The Meridian Institute of Artificial Intelligence has announced a three-year research partnership with Archipelago Health Systems, a regional health network operating 14 hospitals and over 80 outpatient clinics. The partnership will support applied research on clinical AI deployment, with a focus on equity, reliability, and transparency.
The collaboration is the largest industry partnership in Meridian's history, providing $2.4 million in research funding and access to de-identified clinical datasets covering more than 4 million patient encounters. The data will be used under a strict data governance framework developed jointly by the two organizations and reviewed by Meridian's institutional review board.
Research under the partnership will be led by Dr. Fatima Al-Rashid, director of Meridian's Clinical AI Research Group, with co-investigator roles for Dr. Chioma Adeyemi (AI ethics) and Dr. Marcus Webb (computer vision). Three PhD students and two postdoctoral fellows will be funded through the grant.
The initial research agenda includes three projects: a study of how clinical decision support AI affects diagnostic equity across patient demographic groups; a computer vision project examining the reliability of AI-assisted radiology tools under distribution shift (e.g., imaging hardware changes between facilities); and a governance framework project developing institutional protocols for responsible AI procurement in healthcare settings.
"Health AI is moving fast and the field needs more rigorous, independent research on what happens after deployment," said Dr. Al-Rashid. "Archipelago has been a genuinely thoughtful partner in designing this collaboration. They gave us real access and real research freedom, which is not something every health system is ready to do."
Dr. Yolanda Ferris, Archipelago's Chief Medical Officer, said the partnership reflects the health system's commitment to evidence-based AI adoption. "We are deploying AI tools, and we want to know honestly how they perform and for whom. Meridian's expertise in ethics and technical evaluation is exactly what we need."
The partnership launches in Q2 2026, with first research outputs expected by early 2027.