Photo: Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic Platform has launched a new initiative that seeks to democratize care delivery innovations by guiding smaller or less-resourced organizations from falling behind in the rapid evolution of medical technology, the health system announced this week.
With the new project, called Mayo Clinic Platform_Insights, the health system aims to create an affordable path to technologies that can solve some of the providers' greatest challenges to enhancing patient care.
WHY IT MATTERS
Patients, including those with complex diseases, who cannot reach Mayo Clinic's physical locations could benefit from the knowledge the company has amassed through innovations with artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, according to the health system.
The foundation behind the new global data sharing platform is what the health system has already created with prior applications of machine learning and other AI technologies to train and validate data.
The Mayo Clinic Platform and its academic research partners have amassed 26 petabytes of clinical information through its Connect global health data network. This includes more than 3 billion laboratory tests, upward of 2 billion clinical notes and more than 6 billion medical images.
Mayo Clinic said that empowering other health systems with data-driven insights, best practices, guidance and support available through the new sharing platform could be transformative for patient populations across the world.
"Digital solutions and [AI] have enormous potential to transform healthcare, but there are barriers to widespread adoption," Maneesh Goyal, Mayo Clinic Platform's chief operating officer, said in a statement. "When organizations partner with us, they gain access to proven clinical and administrative solutions and the technical framework to integrate them seamlessly."
THE LARGER TREND
With the rapid evolution of healthcare AI, many less-resourced healthcare organizations could fall behind innovation powerhouse peers like Mayo Clinic and unintentionally limit their patients' ability to access advanced care.
Mayo Clinic said it has the power to use real-world data to advance medical practice, and previously launched an accelerator to develop, validate and deploy digital health systems and healthcare workflow integrations to enable others to do so.
"There is a lot of excitement around the transformative potential of AI in healthcare, but it will only be possible if providers have the tools necessary to demystify and use AI responsibly in clinical care," said Dr. Sonya Makhni, Mayo Clinic Platform's medical director, in a statement about last year's launch of Mayo Clinic's Solutions Studio.
While patient expectations for better access and care quality have only increased in the digital age, healthcare's notoriously outdated technology systems, manual processes and chronic staffing shortages still can leave patients behind, skipping care or without care access at all.
Mayo Clinic's plan to extend access to advanced technologies to lower-resourced providers around the world comes just ahead of HIMSS Global Health Equity Week, which kicks off on Nov. 10.
GHEW focuses on the digital transformation of systems, data and decisions to shape healthcare and realize the full health potential of each patient, according to HIMSS, the parent company of Healthcare IT News, which has spearheaded the initiative since 2019.
ON THE RECORD
"When we share knowledge, we make better decisions – both in diagnosis and treatment," Goyal said in a statement. "This new program allows us to extend the reach and expertise of leading healthcare organizations within our digital ecosystem to help others perform better and improve patient outcomes everywhere."
The HIMSS AI & Cybersecurity Virtual Forum is free to attend on Nov. 18. Learn more and register.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
