Episode #197 The Mayo Clinic Platform: Augmenting the Human-Healthcare Relationship with AI with John Halamka, President, Mayo Clinic Platform

On the show today, we are honored to have Dr. John Halamka, the Dwight and Dian Diercks president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, a digital initiative that brings together solution developers, data partners and healthcare service providers to transform healthcare. Trained in emergency medicine and medical informatics, Dr. Halamka has been developing and implementing healthcare information strategy and policy for more than 40 years. He continues to practice emergency medicine and is Professor of Emergency Medicine and the Michael D. Brennan, M.D., President’s Strategic Initiative Professor at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.

Dr. Halamka has written 15 books and hundreds of articles. He and his wife run Unity Farm Sanctuary in Sherborn, Massachusetts, dedicated to the lifetime care of ill, disabled, senior, orphaned and surrendered farm animals.

The work John and his team at the Mayo Clinic Platform are doing is nothing short of extraordinary. Leveraging their access to Mayo’s massive data set and employing the full breadth of AI capabilities, they have been able to create a platform that allows rapid innovation by de-identifying and sharing medical data while still protecting patient privacy. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this project – the platform currently has 250 predictive algorithms and 8 foundation models in production with a goal of impacting the health of four BILLION people by 2030.

As you’ll realize by the end of this interview, Dr. John Halamka is an extraordinary individual, physician, informaticist and leader. He has a tremendous platform and influence but my hope is that his humanitarian influence expands as far, as wide, and as deep as possible within the national and international healthcare domains. If there is anyone I would trust to guide us into the future of AI in healthcare, it would be Dr. Halamka.