What is the message?

Mayo Clinic and Mercy have reached a significant milestone in their collaboration to leverage de-identified patient data, aiming to improve disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

What are the key points?

Collaboration and Data Sharing: Mayo Clinic and Mercy, as founding members of Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect, can now securely analyze each other’s de-identified patient data, enhancing research capabilities.

Expansion of Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect: The platform has grown to include eight healthcare organizations across seven countries, broadening the genetic, demographic, and lifestyle diversity of the data set.

AI and Predictive Analytics: The collaboration utilizes artificial intelligence to develop and validate algorithms that predict chronic diseases and support personalized care, integrated into clinical workflows.

Global Impact: Products, algorithms, and tools developed through this collaboration can be shared globally, potentially transforming medical practices worldwide.

What are the key examples?

Global Expansion: New members like Seoul National University Hospital, SingHealth, and UC Davis Health join existing members to create a vast, diverse data repository.

Data Utilization: The Data Behind Glass approach allows each organization to retain control over its data while facilitating trend analysis, risk factor identification, and predictive insights.

What are the key statistics?

Mercy serves millions annually and was named the top large U.S. health system for patient experience by NRC Health.

In fiscal year 2023, Mercy provided over half a billion dollars in community benefits, including charity care and unreimbursed Medicaid.

Conclusion

The milestone achieved by Mayo Clinic and Mercy in their data collaboration marks a significant step towards proactive, data-driven healthcare.

By harnessing a diverse, global data set and employing advanced analytics, the partnership aims to revolutionize disease detection, treatment personalization, and overall patient care, setting a new standard for healthcare innovation.

DEEP DIVE

Mayo Clinic and Mercy reach first major milestone in data collaboration

Terri Malloy

May 16, 2024

Decades of data can now be used to pinpoint diseases earlier and transform healthcare.

ROCHESTER, Minn. and ST. LOUIS — Mayo Clinic and Mercy are making a significant advancement in their global, first-of-its-kind 10-year collaboration agreement signed in the summer of 2022. As founding members of Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect, the two organizations will now be working together to analyze de-identified patient data as they search for new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease, providing better outcomes and lower costs of care.

Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect is a distributed data network that provides secure access to de-identified clinical data. Previously, Mercy and Mayo Clinic could use Connect to analyze data from their own organizations, but as of today, each organization can safely and securely analyze de-identified patient data from either health system. This significantly larger data set allows researchers and innovators to better identify risk factors, predict illnesses and provide earlier treatment with the potential to positively impact millions of patients’ lives. 

“Mayo Clinic Platform is enabling innovation to change how care is provided. At its core, Platform relies on our distributed data network to make available data that has depth, breadth and spread, and which can help create new ways to diagnose, treat and care for patients no matter where in the world they might live. Today represents a significant milestone, demonstrating the power of collaboration in transforming healthcare,” said John Halamka, M.D., president of Mayo Clinic Platform.

Mayo Clinic Platform recently announced the addition of three healthcare organizations to its global collaboration: Seoul National University Hospital in South Korea, Singapore’s SingHealth and UC Davis Health in California. This expansion brings the total number of Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect members to eight, including founding members Mayo Clinic and Mercy, Brazil’s Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, Israel’s Sheba Medical Center and Canada’s University Health Network, who joined in 2023. The alliance now spans seven countries across three continents, representing diversity in genetics, demographics and lifestyles to provide a massive repository of analyzable data.

“This is a major step toward moving healthcare from being reactive to proactively addressing the biggest concerns of patients and the communities we serve,” said Joe Kelly, executive vice president, chief transformation officer for Mercy. “This unprecedented data set allows us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to develop algorithms and validate treatment plans effectively for complex patient populations. These algorithms, integrated directly into everyday clinical workflows, can help us predict the likelihood of chronic diseases and help to better proactively assist patients earlier in their care, improving outcomes and reducing costs for both patients and health systems.”

Each organization will be able to look for trends, indicators, risk factors and more while retaining control over its de-identified outcomes through Mayo Clinic Platform’s Data Behind Glass approach. Mayo Clinic and Mercy will develop products, algorithms and tools for their health systems that can be made available to other health systems for use in the same transformative way, potentially impacting the practice of medicine across the globe.

“After more than a year in development, we now have a platform that permits insights from Mercy’s own data and that of Mayo Clinic. This data will improve patients’ lives by helping us find diseases earlier and supporting more personalized care,” said Byron Yount, chief data and AI officer for Mercy. “This will significantly deepen partnerships, broaden the scope of discovery, quicken the speed of innovation and ultimately improve care for patients everywhere. We are already learning with our new health care collaborators and reimagining how we approach health care challenges and opportunities. The way we produce the world’s most impactful solutions is evolving, and Mayo Clinic Platform is going to enable it.”

About Mayo Clinic Platform

Founded on Mayo Clinic’s dedication to patient-centered care, Mayo Clinic Platform enables new knowledge, new solutions and new technologies through collaborations with health technology innovators to create a healthier world.

About Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research, and providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. Visit the Mayo Clinic News Network for additional Mayo Clinic news.

About Mercy

Mercy, one of the 20 largest U.S. health systems and named the top large system in the U.S. for excellent patient experience by NRC Health, serves millions annually with nationally recognized care and one of the nation’s largest and highest performing Accountable Care Organizations in quality and cost. Mercy is a highly integrated, multi-state healthcare system including more than 50 acute care and specialty (heart, children’s, orthopedic and rehab) hospitals, convenient and urgent care locations, imaging centers and pharmacies. Mercy has over 900 physician practice locations and outpatient facilities, more than 4,500 physicians and advanced practitioners and 50,000 co-workers serving patients and families across Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Mercy also has clinics, outpatient services and outreach ministries in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In fiscal year 2023 alone, Mercy provided more than half a billion dollars of free care and other community benefits, including traditional charity care and unreimbursed Medicaid.