Summary<\/p>\n
Tens of millions of people are now turning to AI chatbots for health advice.
\n Microsoft and Mayo Clinic are partnering to build an AI model trained on medical records and clinical expertise.
\n The tool could eventually help patients understand diagnoses and treatment options and support doctors.<\/p>\n
\n AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.<\/p>\n
New York\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
\n People have been seeking out health information online since the dawn of the internet. And now, tens of millions of people<\/a> are turning to artificial intelligence for questions they once asked \u201cDr. Google.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But the large language models behind most mainstream AI chatbots are trained on a wide variety of content \u2014 including huge swaths of the internet \u2014 meaning the advice can be iffy<\/a> and occasionally dangerous<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n 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\u2019s clinicians, which they say will help both patients and providers.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Mayo Clinic CEO Gianrico Farrugia told CNN ahead of the project\u2019s announcement at Microsoft\u2019s Build developer event on Tuesday\n <\/p>\n \n Mayo Clinic will own the model, and the organizations hope it will eventually power AI tools for clinicians at the health provider\u2019s hospitals \u2014 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\u2019s online portal. The model could also improve how Microsoft\u2019s Copilot consumer AI chatbot answers health-related questions.\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n But it won\u2019t happen overnight. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said he expects it to take \u201cmany years\u201d for the two parties to train and refine the model to be accurate enough to be trusted for high-stakes health questions and consumer use. The model will initially be available to Mayo Clinic professionals, so they can test it for accuracy before rolling it out more broadly.\n <\/p>\n \n Many of the big AI companies are racing to dominate the health advice space. Google, for example, has rolled out<\/a> an \u201cAI Health Coach\u201d that promises to do everything from developing personalized fitness plans to reviewing users\u2019 medical data. Anthropic<\/a> and OpenAI<\/a> have also built health assistants into their chatbots.\n <\/p>\n