Mayo Clinic Platform announced an expansion to its distributed data network, Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect, through new global partnerships with Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in Brazil, Sheba Medical Center in Israel, and University Health Network (UHN) in Canada, which will support work to artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. This partnership builds on an earlier relationship between Mayo Clinic Platform and Mercy, which began a 10-year data sharing and model validation collaboration with Mayo Clinic in 2022.
Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect is designed to provide secure, cloud-based data access through Mayo’s Data Behind Glass approach. With this new expansion to Connect, clinicians and researchers will have access to de-identified clinical data for use in research, but data doesn’t need to be moved, and each health system keeps control over its own data.
The expansion of Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect and its partnerships aims to advance ethical health AI as part of a larger effort to transform patient care and improve outcomes. More specifically, the goal is development and deployment of new and innovative machine learning models, built using more diverse and representative patient data.
"We describe the data needed for fair, equitable AI as having depth (types of information), breadth (number of patients) and spread (heterogeneity)," said Dr. John Halamka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform, in a statement.
"To transform health care globally, we must expand our distributed data networks to every continent. We must protect privacy, adhere to international laws and regulations, and incorporate knowledge from every language."
Complex medical information, such as EHRs, radiology and pathology images and videos, and other types of unstructured data can be challenging to gather and analyze. The number of languages that these data are captured in across continents and countries creates an additional barrier to consolidating and using this type of data on a global scale.
Mayo Clinic Platform plans to add new U.S. and global members to the collaboration in the months ahead, according to last week’s announcement. "Mayo Clinic is transforming health care, but we are not doing this work alone," said Gianrico Farrugia, MD, president, and CEO of Mayo Clinic. "We created Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect to enable innovative organizations to join us to partner to create a healthier, more equitable future for everybody."
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