Tomislav Mihaljevic, MD, president and CEO of Cleveland Clinic, doesn’t hesitate when asked about the future of healthcare: he believes a technological inflection point has finally arrived.
For decades, health systems around the world have wrestled with the same unrelenting problems: too few clinicians, too little access, and costs that climb faster than innovation can keep pace. Traditional models, he argues, were never built to solve challenges of this magnitude.
But now, a new set of tools has emerged.
“I’m very bullish about the application of AI, digital technology and computational technology in general,” said Dr. Mihaljevic during an interview with Rhoda Weiss, PhD, National Healthcare Consultant, Speaker, Educator and Author, at the Becker’s 13th Annual CEO+CFO Roundtable. “It is just a wonderful tool that we never had at our disposal, especially when you think about the global challenges in healthcare.”
What excites him isn’t the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence — it’s the possibility that, for the first time, healthcare has technology powerful enough to meaningfully rethink how care is delivered.
“Access, lack of talent and affordability have been present in perpetuity in every country around the world because the current business model cannot solve for it,” said Dr. Mihaljevic. “You cannot squeeze sufficient efficiency out of the current business model, so the only way forward in my mind is through integration of technology. Until the onset of AI, we did not really have enough technology that is efficient and sufficiently sophisticated to overcome these challenges. That’s why I’m so excited about AI, because it will change everything. It’s changing everything.”
At Cleveland Clinic, that shift is already underway, from AI-driven predictive models in cardiology and oncology to quantum-enabled research that could accelerate drug discovery at a pace previously out of reach. Clinical trials are accelerating and care is becoming more precise and personalized. With deep partnerships across the tech sector, Dr. Mihaljevic sees the next era of medicine being written.
“We cannot do it by ourselves,” said Dr. Mihaljevic. “One really wonderful thing is the partnerships we’ve formed with a number of AI companies or digital companies. We’re very fortunate to have very strong partnerships. We’ve had partnerships for many years with IBM, which has brought the first and only quantum computer in biomedical sciences to Cleveland Clinic. We have a great relationship with all the big companies: Microsoft, Palantir, and a growing and very interesting collaboration with Oracle and Oracle Health as well as with Ellison Institute of Technology.”
The health system has more than 50 research projects in advancing life sciences and 12 quantum-related projects in drug discovery, predictive modeling, imaging and more. Cleveland Clinic and their partners are just scratching the surface of possibilities with quantum computing technology and working with experts in the field to optimize outcomes.
“Quantum computing is cool because everybody’s telling me that quantum computing can do what no supercomputer can do, which is true. We have a first-generation of quantum computing; there is a second generation of quantum computing by IBM that is coming up. Google is now caught up on it, but we have to all recognize that quantum computing is still a research computational tool,” said Dr. Mihaljevic. “It is not just a more powerful laptop that you can plug in and it’s going to get you wherever you need much quicker; it doesn’t work that way. The data needs to be structured, they need to be organized in a certain way in order to have the desired output. But the computational power is phenomenal.”
Quantum computing can have the biggest advantage for drug development at the moment, Dr. Mihaljevic said, due to the heightened complexity of the processes. For example, quantum computing can help researchers understand the sequence of amino acids in newly synthesized proteins as well as their three-dimensional configuration.
“We are collaborating with IBM and we have expanded the collaboration and educational programs to other universities, to our medical school, but also the University of Miami in Ohio, which we are happy about because there’s a lot of interest in quantum computing,” said Dr. Mihaljevic. “Five to 10 years ago, people used to speak about quantum computing just like they used to speak about xenotransplant; quantum computing is the future of computing and it is always going to be the future of computing, meaning you’re never going to get there.”
