Good luck with that! Wasnt Obamacare supposed do that? bend the curve on healthcare costs? you cant bend a curve when you have newer medicines and machines keeping people alive who would have died 10+ years ago. sorry its not possible. Not trying to be mean but reality is hard to swallow.

I've got nothing against United Health or Mayo but isn't this like the Fox doing research on how best to guard the chicken coup? Perhaps major employers (payers) should get together and do this. Mayo is a payee in the process and United is just a money pump that takes a cut of everything spent on health care. The bigger the system, the better it is for both United and Mayo. They have no incentive to succeed. AND, I agree with moron100 in that we are acquiring the technology to keep people alive longer and longer at greater expense (to us and our kids) and, as a society, we have to decide when to let folks die. We cannot expect the insurance companies and doctors to do that for us.

This sounds like a good start, but when will the ENTIRE health system be able to share critical patient information in a secure and reliable way? Today, it's like starting from scratch every time you visit a new health care professional -- primary care provider, chiropractor, dentist, etc. How many times have I subjected my body and my wallet to x-rays because one doctor couldn't get the existing ones from my last doctor? Looking forward to Mayo's insights, but even more than that, hoping they can create a standard for data sharing.

Of more concern should be the relationship of a highly profitable for profit entity with a highly profitable non-profit one. Sometimes the lines get a little blurry.

I'm still in awe as to why this state does not implement a Single-Payer system.

Why is this news? Allina and Mayo did the same thing last year

My health records are confidential. I do not want ANY for-profit insurance company,making billions of dollars, to have access to my records.

Interesting article. I did not have a great outcome with my hip replacement at Mayo Clinic. I went to the #1 hospital in the country for orthopedics, The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, to find out that my legs were not even. A very common complication for hip replacements. Some of the Orthopedic Surgeons at Mayo do not want their patients in physical therapy, because of studies that say it takes people longer to recover when working with a physical therapist.(These studies were also done in England and saw that patients without physical therapy and did not have complex cases did fine.) Each Orthopedic Surgeon at Mayo Clinic decides their level of care. The components used in my hip replacement were manufactured by Zimmer. I read an article recently that discloses that my Orthopedic Surgeon receives royalties from Zimmer for hip and knee implant devices. I am not saying here that these parts were not the best choice for my circumstances, but I wonder how these issues will be addressed while trying to reduce costs? Will Orthopedic Surgeons at Mayo need to show why they are using certain implants over others and why they want after-care or lack of it?

If you want to reduce healthcare costs... get the insurance companies out of it. Get the gov't out of it. Go back to people making and paying for their own medical decisions. I know that i am being simple here but if you had to pay for your medicines then you would make decisions differently. Yes people need help and that is why everyone should have major medical coverage and thats it. No mandates etc... that will reduce costs quickly.

This project represents a huge competitive advantage for Mayo and UHC. Mayo has the most comprehensive patient history datasets in the world. UHC excels at health economics. The sad part is that they are locating the bioinformatics and analytics in Massachusetts. One would have thought that IBM in Rochester could have played a major role in computational power - to keep the whole enterprise in Minnesota. Still great news, however.