Dr John Halamka says a population-scale platform is a lot cheaper and faster to implement than governments and health leaders think.
Australia could deploy a population-scale predictive prevention platform within nine months if health organisations are willing to prepare and standardise their data, according to Mayo Clinic Platform president Dr John Halamka.
Speaking at the Health Services Daily and The Medical Republic Prevention Summit in Canberra on Wednesday, Dr Halamka said the biggest barrier to deploying artificial intelligence for prevention was not the technology itself but the quality and readiness of healthcare data.
Asked how long it would take to establish a system capable of generating predictive insights from population-level health data, Dr Halamka said:
“It’s about nine months.”
The timeline, he said, largely reflected the work required to prepare data for use.
“It just turns out that even the best healthcare system has not curated normalised data,” he said.
“It takes us nine months to go through every data source, de-identify, clean up, curate, cloud host, and make the tools available.”
Dr Halamka also suggested the cost of joining the emerging AI-prevention ecosystem is lower than many health leaders might expect.
Asked what it would cost a hospital or health system to participate, he said organisations with a few million patient records could typically prepare their data for between US$1 million and US$2 million.
“One to $2 million is typically what it takes to curate the data,” he said.
The investment, he argued, creates a foundation for a wide range of future applications, including predictive analytics, AI-powered decision support and participation in broader data-sharing networks.
One of the most provocative claims from Dr Halamka centred on the potential for large-scale real-world data to transform clinical research.
He described work undertaken by a Mayo Clinic Platform clinician who used the organisation’s data assets to test findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2025.
“In one weekend she replicated the entire year of the New England Journal of Medicine,” he said.
According to Dr Halamka, all but two of the studies produced validating results.
“We’re starting to see if the data is broad and deep enough, at the very least, you can focus your randomised clinical trials much better by doing simulated or emulated trials in these data sets,” he said.
“Society may ultimately decide when the data gets big enough that that’s good enough.”
The discussion repeatedly returned to prevention and the ability of large-scale datasets to identify interventions before patients develop serious disease.
“We’re starting to see that in a majority of patients, you can actually prevent progression of pre-diabetes to type two diabetes by giving GLP-1s proactively,” Dr Halamka said.
“Giving a GLP-1 is going to prevent future illness.”
He also pointed to examples of AI already being deployed operationally in health systems.
Referring to the Catholic health network in the US, Dr Halamka said: “They have built agentic AI already, it’s already live.”
The system identifies patients with poorly controlled diabetes and initiates interventions aimed at preventing future complications.
Dr Halamka said Australia already possesses many of the key ingredients required to deploy similar capabilities, including a national health identifier, My Health Record and growing interoperability infrastructure.
“I’ve already got approvals from Singapore, South Korea, Kenya to do countrywide data stewardship,” he said.
“Let’s get Australia in that mix.”
While governments have an important role to play, Dr Halamka suggested they do not necessarily need to be the primary drivers of innovation.
“Sometimes governments lead, and sometimes governments follow,” he said. “Maybe the role of government is convener.”
He also warned that many countries were moving faster than traditional health systems might assume.
“Southeast Asia is moving fast, Middle East is moving fast, sub-Saharan Africa is moving fast,” he said.
By comparison, “Europe is lagging much of the rest of the world”.
