[ad_1]
ROCHESTER, Minnesota – The Mayo Clinic, one of the most prestigious brands in medicine, announced Tuesday a partnership with Google to store patient data in the cloud and create products using artificial intelligence and other technologies to improve care.
This 10-year partnership demonstrates Google's growing role in the US healthcare system and gives Mayo greater access to the engineering talent and IT resources needed to integrate its expertise in commercial algorithms and devices.
Google has announced the opening of a new office in Rochester, a city whose economy, and even identity, is inextricably linked to Mayo, who invented the medical record there is more than a century and seeks to exploit its data to better understand the care provided to patients. . The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
publicity
The agreement is partly motivated by Mayo's desire to expand its use of artificial intelligence, which is based on modern computing environments in which data can be securely shared and manipulated by physicians and researchers. Much of Mayo's clinical data will be stored in Google's cloud, but hospital officials have pointed out that Mayo will control access to this information.
"We have the keys to the data," said Chris Ross, head of hospital system information. "These are private data controlled by Mayo that we keep on behalf of our patients. Google has no right or opportunity to access this data. "
As part of this partnership, Ross said, Mayo may decide to share anonymous patient data with Google and other parties for specific research projects.
"We will explore all these opportunities if we are confident that the data can remain confidential," he said, adding, "There are serious plans under way to develop truly transformational health options and solutions that we would market with Google. "
Mayo joins several other large hospital systems to transfer more data from server warehouses on premise and in the cloud. Many of them have signed contracts with the world's leading technology companies. In addition to Google, Microsoft, Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) also work with large health systems to secure, manage and analyze their data.
Mayo's doctors and engineers are already developing artificial intelligence for a variety of clinical uses, such as screening for early signs of heart disease in patients and preventing seizures in people with epilepsy. However, the goal of the partnership with Google is to fuel broader experiences across the hospital system and to help Mayo create an AI that can reach patients well beyond its walls.
The hospital system, which operates facilities in the Midwest, Arizona and Florida, currently has internal cloud storage containing approximately 3 petabytes of data; The agreement with the cloud division of Google will allow it to increase this capacity. (A petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes.)
We do not yet know what health issues Mayo may be dealing with Google or what types of products they will seek to develop and market. In broad terms, the organizations stated that they would seek to develop more effective treatments, educate patients and provide digital tools to diagnose diseases and provide faster and more convenient services.
Aashima Gupta, director of global healthcare solutions at Google Cloud, said the first step is to transfer more Mayo data to the cloud, where it could be more easily aggregated and analyzed by Mayo physicians and researchers .
"To generate large-scale knowledge, we must be able to combine multiple disparate datasets," Gupta said, adding that the combination of genetic information with patients' clinical backgrounds and social and economic data could help provide more effective treatments for patients with complex diseases.
She declined to say how many people would work at Google's Rochester office, but said the Mayo job would likely include employees in multiple locations.
The two organizations had already partnered to optimize Google's search results (about one in 20 Google searches are health-related) to prioritize information from Mayo and other medical organizations.
"These are just small steps," said Ross, adding that Mayo was also exploring projects with DeepMind, the London-based Google subsidiary. "Our health care system offers tremendous opportunities to diagnose and manage disease remotely. We clearly expect to provide solutions outside our physical walls that will be used by other health systems. "
[ad_2]
Source link