Google LLC today announced plans to open an office in Rochester, Minnesota, that will support the search giant’s technology partnership with Mayo Clinic.

The move underscores the growing focus Google is placing on healthcare as part of its cloud strategy. 

The new hub will be located inside Collider Coworking, a coworking space directly adjacent to Mayo Clinic’s Rochester campus. Google said it intends to officially open the office later this year once it’s deemed safe to do so and in line with COVID-19 guidelines. But in a press call, software engineering manager Chris Mueller, who’s the local Google lead for the site, declined to specify how many people would work there.

Mayo Clinic’s Rochester campus is its largest location. The nonprofit hospital system consistently ranks as the best in the U.S. across multiple categories and provides care to more than a million patients annually. Google’s cloud business inked a deal with Mayo Clinic in 2019 to help support its digital transformation plans, a collaboration that the new Rochester officer will advance.

“Google engineers will work side by side with Mayo Clinic researchers, physicians, information technology staff and data scientists, to apply advanced computing techniques to health care problems,” said Mayo Clinic Chief Information Officer Cris Ross.

As part of the partnership, Mayo Clinic has deployed a data platform on Google Cloud to help it store and analyze medical information. It’s also working with the search giant to find new ways of applying artificial intelligence in healthcare. Mueller said the office will be mostly dedicated to engineering, AI and machine learning in particular.

One of their first AI projects, which Google detailed last October, aims to harness machine learning to lower the amount of manual work required to plan radiotherapy treatments. The search giant said that the goal is to speed up the process and thereby reduce wait times for patients. Google is helping Mayo Clinic both develop AI software and study the best way to deploy that software in practice. 

When the partnership was announced, Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian said Mayo Clinic hopes to share new machine learning models developed as part of the alliance with others in the healthcare sector.

Additionally, Kurian detailed at the time, the hospital system would explore opportunities to collaborate with Google’s Google Health division. The division develops AI tools, hardware and other technologies for healthcare professionals. 

“In the first year-and-a-half of our partnership with Mayo Clinic, we’ve helped the prestigious health organization move their data to the cloud, laid the foundation for future innovation, kicked off projects such as exploring the use of AI to help physicians develop radiotherapy plans, and worked together to respond and adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Joe Miles, Google Cloud’s head of healthcare and life sciences, wrote in a blog post today.

In an investor presentation last year, Kurian named healthcare as one of five key sectors Google Cloud is prioritizing as part of its strategy to develop more vertical-specific capabilities. Those specialized capabilities have a central role in Google’s plans to gain an edge over rivaling public clouds.

Google Cloud has already developed multiple healthcare-specific offerings as part of its vertical industry push. One of the newest is the Healthcare Interoperability Readiness Program, a solution bundle introduced in November that’s designed to simplify the management of patient data.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Google