Mayo Clinic, Mercy collaborate to transform patient care

(ABC 6 News) – A collaboration agreement between Mayo Clinic and Mercy will use the most current data science and years of deidentified patient outcomes to find diseases earlier and start patients on paths to better health more quickly.

This is a first-of-its-kind alliance between the two large health systems.

With the combination of privacy-protected, cloud-based technology architecture, and the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this aggregated clinical deidentified data generates patterns to pinpoint disease earlier and identify best treatment options.

The Mayo and Mercy alliance will initially focus on patient outcomes:

• Information collaboration — All data are deidentified and secured in a distributed data network that enables Mayo and Mercy to work with an extensive set of outcomes without extracting or transferring data between the organizations. Each health care system will retain control over its deidentified outcomes throughout the process. The information will help scientists analyze patterns of effective disease treatment and, more importantly, disease prevention in new ways based upon longitudinal data review over an extended period of time.
• Solution and algorithm development and validation — The resulting algorithms will provide proven treatment paths based on years of patient outcomes, representing the next generation of proactive and predictive medicine that can be used by care providers around the world to access best practices in medical care.

“With Mayo and Mercy combining efforts, we can speed prediction and diagnosis, and provide better patient care, experience and outcomes, while ultimately saving more lives,” says Steve Mackin, Mercy’s president and chief executive officer. “We also hope to innovate together in other patient-focused areas, including precision medicine, transplant care, complex cancer, cardiovascular, neuroscience and much more.”

“We have a unique opportunity today to transform mountains of clinical experience into actionable information that optimizes patient care,” says John Mohart, M.D., a cardiologist and president of Mercy communities, leading operations for all Mercy hospitals. “We believe bringing technology and data science to the bedside can provide better patient care, shorter hospital stays and overall better health for people everywhere.”