Mayo Clinic and Microsoft $MSFT announced a collaboration Tuesday to develop an AI model built specifically for healthcare, combining Mayo Clinic's clinical data and medical expertise with Microsoft's AI and cloud computing capabilities.
Ownership of the model will rest with Mayo Clinic, and clinicians within the health system will be the first to use it, putting it through its paces before any wider deployment, the companies said. Microsoft plans to distribute the model through Azure Foundry APIs, giving other healthcare organizations access to the technology.
Unlike general-purpose AI models, the healthcare model is being built to handle clinical reasoning tasks, with a design aimed at supporting earlier diagnoses, more personalized treatment decisions, and better patient outcomes, the companies said. Prior to this partnership, Mayo Clinic had already stripped patient records of identifying information to enable AI training and built targeted models focused on areas such as heart disease detection and pancreatic cancer diagnosis, according to CNN.
"Mayo Clinic is committed to putting patients first, and we have long believed AI can help transform healthcare," Mayo Clinic president and CEO Gianrico Farrugia said in a statement. "By combining our clinical expertise and data foundation with Microsoft's engineering and AI capabilities, we are building something healthcare has never seen before and bringing more of Mayo Clinic to more patients."
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said in a statement: "Mayo has unparalleled clinical expertise, de-identified clinical health data and longitudinal medical insights, and we're thrilled to partner with their world-class physicians to build a state-of-the-art foundation model for healthcare."
Neither organization would reveal what they are investing financially, though Suleyman described the arrangement as involving "very material, long-term commitments to one another" from both parties, according to CNN. Getting the model to a point where it can reliably handle sensitive medical queries and direct consumer interactions will require "many years" of work, Suleyman told CNN.
Looking further ahead, the partnership envisions a conversational tool patients could use directly via Mayo Clinic's web portal, and the underlying model may eventually sharpen the medical responses served up by Microsoft's Copilot chatbot.
The announcement was made at Microsoft's Build developer conference on Tuesday.