Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Mayo Clinic to develop and deploy a frontier AI model specifically for healthcare, combining Mayo Clinic's clinical expertise with the tech giant's technologies.The model, which will be owned by Mayo Clinic, will merge the health system's de-identified clinical data and longitudinal insights with Microsoft's AI, engineering, superintelligence and cloud capabilities.The partners say the aim is for the AI model to support clinical reasoning and healthcare use cases, including supporting earlier diagnosis and personalized treatment decisions to improve patient outcomes.The model will initially be deployed within Mayo Clinic, "where it can be continuously tested, refined and improved through real-world use," the health system said in a statement. Microsoft will ultimately make the model available through its Azure Foundry APIs."Mayo Clinic is committed to putting patients first, and we have long believed AI can help transform healthcare. Seven years ago, we launched Mayo Clinic Platform to move healthcare from a pipeline to a platform model through a safe, trusted, patient-centric de-identified data foundation designed to accelerate innovation, breakthroughs, and cures," Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, president and CEO of Mayo Clinic, said in a statement."Now, by combining our clinical expertise and data foundation with Microsoft’s engineering and AI capabilities, we are once again building something new in healthcare and bringing more of Mayo Clinic to more patients."THE LARGER TRENDLast year, Mayo Clinic announced a partnership with Microsoft Research and AI chip company Cerebras to create generative AI focused on accelerating diagnostic time and personalizing patient care. The partners developed foundation models trained on multimodal radiology images, including CT scans and MRIs, as well as Microsoft Research's genomic sequencing data.​In 2023, Mayo Clinic became the first healthcare organization to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, a generative AI service that combines large language models (LLMs) with organizational data from Microsoft 365. It tested the Microsoft program to determine whether it improved productivity among healthcare workers, doctors and clinical staff.HIMSS is hosting the one-day AI Executive Leadership Summit in Boston on June 24, 2026, followed by its AI in Healthcare Forum June 25-26. Register separately for the two events here and here.