n 1871, when the Sisters of Mercy opened a 25-bed infirmary for women and children in St. Louis, they got to know each patient intimately, says Joe Kelly, Mercy's executive vice president in the Office of Transformation. Kelly is talking about a recent Mercy initiative that he believes will continue this legacy, but it can only be described as futuristic: Together with the Mayo Clinic and three recently announced health care organizations in Israel, Brazil, and Canada, Mercy has entered into a partnership in which it will use artificial intelligence and de-identified patient data to try to improve outcomes for sick patients. Between Mercy and Mayo Clinic, Mercy will have access to secure data on 25 million patients and 900 million “transactions”—that's any interaction a patient has had with a health care provider. If you stuffed all of that information into filing cabinets, the storage drawers would wrap around the world three times, says Kelly; Mercy believes it's one of the largest longitudinal clinical data sets globally. But what does it mean, office supply imagery aside? Instead of having to consult medical journals or hunt for information on their own, Mercy physicians presented with, say, a patient suffering from a rare
