Mayo’s John Halamka on AI, ML and the Government’s Role in Digital Health’s Future

As a self-described latchkey kid growing up in Los Angeles, Dr.
John Halamka says riding his bike to Raytheon, Hughes Aircraft
and Aerojet – and pulling integrated circuits and manuals from
their dumpsters to learn how they worked – lured him into the
world of technology. Not long after, he started developing his
first healthcare-related IT system, which he sold to UCLA when he
was 14.

Those experiences kicked-off a career where Dr. Halamka has
worked at the intersection of technology and healthcare for five
decades. Trained in emergency medicine and medical informatics,
Dr. Halamka has served in many roles, including chief information
officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for more than 20
years, where he oversaw digital health relationships with
industry, academia, and governments worldwide. As the
International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical
School, Dr. Halamka helped the George W. Bush administration,
Obama administration, and governments around the world plan their
health care information strategies.

In his current role as president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, Dr.
Halamka leads a portfolio of platform businesses focused on
transforming health care by leveraging artificial intelligence,
connected health care devices and a network of trusted
partners.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Dr. Halamka shares his
perspective on the evolution of digital health and where the
industry is headed through an in-depth conversation with Keith
Figlioli. The topics they cover include:



Mayo’s platform play. As president of the Mayo Clinic
Platform, Dr. Halamka spends time explaining the organization’s
view about what constitutes a platform and why it’s important.
He describes it as an ecosystem that’s built to foster
innovation at an extraordinarily fast pace. He contrasts the
approach to other healthcare organizations where building
collaboration is hard, and discusses how the Mayo Clinic
Platform makes it easy for innovators to find mentors, access
millions of de-identified patient records to test new
technology, tap into thousands of clinical experts to address a
problem, and so much more.


The arc of healthcare IT. Dr. Halamka explains
innovation in digital health – especially through the
implementation of Meaningful Use over the past decade – with a
quote from Winston Churchill: “Americans will always do the
right thing. After they’ve tried everything else.” While it
took a long time to arrive, he does not lament the journey and
expresses optimism for the current state and future of digital
health.


Guardrails for AI and ML. Much like Google Cloud’s
Aashima Gupta described in a past Healthcare is Hard episode,
Dr. Halamka talks about the need for a standard set of metrics
to measure the performance of AI models in healthcare. He views
his career as seven or eight distinct periods of achievement
including events like standardizing vocabularies or moving to
APIs, and believes the next period will be about creating the
guidelines, guardrails and transparency for machine learning in
healthcare, and using it ubiquitously across the globe. 


Convergence of AI and ML models. Dr. Halamka says he is
seeing an amazing array of startup activity creating models for
niche purposes on multimodal data. He says there will be a huge
number of model providers and talks about the importance of
platform players being able to bring them together. He says
data liquidity and a huge ecosystem of players coming together
will be revolutionary in the ability for people to navigate
their health care.



To hear Dr. Halamka and Keith talk about these topics and more,
listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for
Insiders.