How AI could bring Mayo-quality health care to everyone (axios.com)

My wife, Autumn, has spent nearly a quarter of the past four years in ERs and hospitals, untangling and battling three chronic conditions — and a shamefully broken U.S. medical system. We live in Washington, D.C., with top-rated hospitals in our backyard. Yet her experience has been eye-opening and often horrifying, especially for a nation that spends twice as much on medical care as our rivals. What it's like: ERs so hauntingly jammed she's often stacked like cargo in hallways, on a stretcher, waiting double-digit hours for care. Well-intentioned and often talented nurses overwhelmed and overworked. Doctors forbidden from, or uninterested in, working with experts beyond their domain to solve complex conditions. It's random luck if you get a specialist willing to even show up to your hospital room. You need a forensic detective to hunt down medical records scattered across random portals and hospitals. And then a miracle to get anyone to piece them together for clues. "It feels like riding a stationary bicycle when you need to be somewhere," Autumn says. And we're the lucky ones, with blue-chip insurance, a sophisticated understanding of the system and resources to attack problems. Most patients don't have those things. All of this left us infuriated and hopeless — until we landed in a small Minnesota city and glimpsed medical nirvana: the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. It was like discovering a foreign land — or seeing a future that could and should be. The best part: I soon discovered AI could easily help unlock the best of Mayo for everyone. Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, a gastroenterologist who's president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic, told me he's racing to show the federal government and other hospitals how to replicate the Mayo magic. How it works: Mayo doctors work as teams. They're paid to heal, not to operate or medicate. Nurses handle four or so patients — fewer than we've experienced at even some of the best hospitals back home. Everyone is kind and talented. Rooms are clean. Every appointment begins on time. Imaging and blood tests get scheduled immediately, not after months of anxious waiting. Results land instantly in your online portal. But the real difference-maker: Doctors and patients leverage massive databases of medical information, sorted and analyzed by AI, then channeled into 500 different algorithms to help find cures and better serve patients. It's a real-time, real-world fusion of man and machine, helping patients get healthier, faster by tapping into superior medical data about you and others with similar conditions. Consider cases like Autumn's: She has several different things wrong requiring expertise across many domains. Few, if any, humans could piece together this puzzle alone. This is where AI could make a big impact — now. Mayo recently signed a deal with Microsoft to expand and expedite its own frontier AI model to further scale and refine this work. Both Mayo and Microsoft are fine-tuning the AI with hopes of sharing it br