Mayo Clinic has agreed to a ten-year collaboration with Mercy, a health system that has more than 2,700 doctors and specialists in four US states.
Mercy is a health system based in the United States, which has a team of more than 2,100 primary care physicians and 600 specialists, to offer services in more than 300 establishments throughout four states. Mercy recently agreed to sign a ten-year collaboration with Mayo Clinic, one of the largest health systems in the United States.
Notably, Mayo and Mercy were the first health systems to adopt integrated electronic health records and have collected vast amounts of clinical data and treatment information for more than ten years.
This collaboration, which is also the first between two large health systems, aims to use data science to improve patient outcomes and diagnose diseases early.
"This unique collaboration will remove barriers to health care innovation by bringing together data and human expertise through a new way of working together," said John Halamka, MD, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform. In addition, he emphasized that collaborative work will lead to better and new treatments and diagnoses that can transform medicine globally.
Both systems recently began a digitization process to structure their databases. Through cloud-based technologies, security standards, and the application of Artificial Intelligence, clinical data can now generate patterns to identify diseases and better treatment options.
“This gives clinicians, providers and operational leaders critical information that can ensure patients receive the right treatment at the right time based on millions of previous patient results, while improving operational efficiency and reducing costs. We believe that bringing technology and data science to the bedside can deliver better patient care, shorter hospital stays, and overall better health for people everywhere,” explained Dr. John Mohart, cardiologist and president of Mercy communities.
As Mayo Clinic explains in its statement, the collaboration will initially focus on:
- Information Collaboration: All data is de-identified and protected in a distributed data network that allows Mayo and Mercy to work with a broad set of results without extracting or transferring data between organizations.
- Development and validation of solutions and algorithms: The resulting algorithms will provide proven treatment pathways based on years of patient outcomes, representing the next generation of proactive and predictive medicine.
"With the combined efforts of Mayo and Mercy, we can accelerate prediction and diagnosis, and deliver better patient care, experience and outcomes, while saving more lives," said Steve Mackin, CEO of Mercy.
