Microsoft, Mayo Clinic Partner for Healthcare AI

Source Domain: seattlemedium.com

Microsoft is partnering with Mayo Clinic to build an AI model specifically trained for use in healthcare. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — People have been seeking out health information online since the dawn of the internet. And now, tens of millions of people are turning to artificial intelligence for questions they once asked “Dr. Google.”

But the large language models behind most mainstream AI chatbots are trained on a wide variety of content — including huge swaths of the internet — meaning the advice can be iffy and occasionally dangerous.

Microsoft and Mayo Clinic are now teaming up to address that by building an AI model trained specifically on medical data, including records, research and the expertise of the hospital’s clinicians, which they say will help both patients and providers.

“We needed to have the right data and the right people in the right place to be able to do this, and we firmly believe that will result in better healthcare outcomes for people who use the model,” Mayo Clinic CEO Gianrico Farrugia told CNN ahead of the project’s announcement at Microsoft’s Build developer event on Tuesday

Mayo Clinic will own the model, and the organizations hope it will eventually power AI tools for clinicians at the health provider’s hospitals — with the potential to license the technology to other healthcare institutions. They also aim to build an AI healthcare assistant that patients can engage with through the hospital’s online portal. The model could also improve how Microsoft’s Copilot consumer AI chatbot answers health-related questions.

The tool could, for example, let patients ask for more details about a diagnosis, better understand likely next steps in their care or get information on preventative care.

But it won’t happen overnight. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said he expects it to take “many years” for the two…

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