Not going unnoticed: Mayo Clinic’s interest in tapping patient data to advance medical AI
Healthcare AI companies of all sizes need patient data to design their products and make their fortunes. Big healthcare providers have the data and need the tech partners to help advance modern medicine.
Should the players somehow include patients in this lucrative loop?
A healthcare reporter pursuing such a question and related issues might do well to home in on Mayo Clinic and its growing cadre of innovation partners.
Casey Ross of Stat News does exactly that in an article posted June 3.
So far, Ross reports, Mayo has shaken hands with 16 tech companies. The strategy has scared up less than $5 million—a token amount to an institution of Mayo’s size and reach, he notes. Still, it’s a substantial enough sum to suggest momentum is only building.
Taking Ross’s questions, Mayo executives say they’re dogged about protecting patient data, refusing to sell it to any would-be direct purchasers. The fiscal perks of partnering with—and in cases investing in—private companies are “spread over a longer time horizon, as these companies grow and begin to sell their products more widely,” Ross writes. “The health system also furthers its advantage against smaller competitors who do not have enough patient data or financial firepower to compete on medicine’s AI frontier.”
The article includes a look at Mayo Clinic Ventures, which, Ross notes, launched in the 1980s as a modest tech-transfer office and now operates as an investment fund with financial stakes in all sorts of healthcare vendors.
MCV has made 321 licensing deals over the past two years, we learn, bringing in around $80 million in each of those years.
“Most of those deals involve commercialization of traditional medical devices and biopharmaceutical products developed in part by the health system’s physicians,” Ross points out. “But a growing number are focused on the development of digital devices and products that rely on artificial intelligence—and access to patient data.”
Read the rest at Stat News:
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.