Mayo Clinic Platform's Ambitious Plan to Make a Healthcare System that Learns

 Platforms have been turning industries upside down for a long time, including healthcare. They are in a unique position to solve the complex problems that plague the industry.

Dr. John Halamka, who is president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, wants platform disruption for himself, and he has a lot of faith in Mayo Clinic to lead the way.

Pioneering scientists have always been driven to do research, make scientific discoveries, and move medicine forward, even when they had few, flawed, or often confusing data to work with.

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For example, when cholera was very common in London in the middle of the 1800s, it took the persistence and brilliance of research scientist John Snow to put death data on maps of the city and figure out that contaminated wastewater was the main cause of the epidemics in England.

This was a huge discovery that was made with very little data, few resources, and no help from technology.

Back up to the present. At least one-third of all the data made in the world is about health.

With so much information at our disposal, the idea of putting it all together for research in a way that can save a lot of money, make someone live longer, or improve their health is very appealing. One of the best ways to do this is by using platforms that bring together data about healthcare.

John Halamka, MD, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform and a longtime supporter of health IT, said something that really stuck with me during a recent conversation about what has been going on at the Mayo Clinic Platform since it started in 2019.

Halamka said, "I want to leave this world in a way that every time my daughter gets a treatment, she can learn from all the patients who came before her."

As a father and an expert in health IT, I can attest to Dr. Halamka's admirable dedication to the growth of health technology and his inspiring vision for what the Mayo Clinic Platform can do.

What is the platform of the Mayo Clinic?

On its website, the Mayo Clinic Platform is called a "route" for health care innovations that can change how hospitals and doctors treat patients.

The Mayo Clinic Platform is a marketplace that connects its members to a wide range of goods, services, and solutions from the Mayo Clinic Network. Its goal is to improve clinical care and operational workflows, in part by using AI and machine learning in new ways.

Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., the president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic, thinks that what the company is making should be a model for other businesses that want to improve healthcare in the same way.

Everyone will handle it a little bit differently. We are just the beginning. Farrugia told us, "We're giving them the plan.

Since 2019, Farrugia has been the president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic. He has worked there for more than 29 years and says that business thinking needs to change from a "pipeline" to a "platform" view.

Farrugia says that the pipeline approach is still the default. At the Mayo Clinic and through the Mayo Clinic Platform, platform thinking is slowly taking over from the pipeline approach.

Healthcare needs a paradigm shift, and we need to explain and show how this works so people can see how revolutionary it can be "the author said.

Using what Halamka calls a "data behind glass" approach, the Mayo Clinic Platform makes it possible to do advanced data analytics on de-identified data and train AI algorithms on that data.

The information comes from the large amount of clinical research and scientific writing that has been published, as well as from the Mayo Clinic and other platform partner organisations.

The federated architecture of the Mayo Clinic Platform makes it possible for partners to use deidentified data in a safe way from a single, central location, behind the proverbial glass, while taking into account data privacy, security, and access rights.

Maneesh Goyal, the chief operating officer of Mayo Clinic Platform, says that at the end of the day, "we're trying to take all the pieces of the healthcare value chain, which is very fragmented and messy for solution developers, and compress them, because that's how platforms work and that's how innovation happens."

When the Mayo Clinic Platform first came out in 2019, Halamka was excited about the potential and promise of platforms to change the way healthcare is done.

He said that the growing digitalization of health care gives us a chance we've never had to solve hard medical problems and make people's lives better all over the world. "Platform business models have been a source of change in a lot of different industries."

Even after three years, he still has the same drive. The author says, "Of all the organisations I've worked with, I think the Mayo Clinic has the best chance of really starting this fundamental change in how health care is given around the world."

A federated platform with three sides

When the Mayo Clinic Platform's business model is looked at in detail, it shows that it is a three-sided platform marketplace with data network partners (hospitals and health systems that make their data discoverable on the platform),

Solutions developers (companies that use Mayo Clinic Platform products and data to train and test AI models) and healthcare service providers (organisations that want to buy solutions that have been tested by Mayo Clinic Platform's data) are the two types of users of Mayo Clinic Platform.

Part of the technology infrastructure that the Platform needs to run is provided by another group of partners, which the Mayo Clinic calls "building partners."

In July 2022, the Mayo Clinic signed Mercy as its first data network health system partner. Halamka said this was a unique relationship that would "eliminate the barriers to innovation in health care by bringing together data and human expertise through a new way of working together."

Mercy has medical offices, outpatient facilities, urgent care centres, and acute care facilities in the states of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Mercy has more than 2,100 primary care and specialty care doctors and 600 advanced practitioners working at 300 locations.

Mayo and Mercy are both early adopters of integrated EHRs, so they have a lot of clinical and outcome data that can be used for analysis and AI treatment.

In the 2022 announcement, the companies emphasised that the combination of the Mayo Clinic Platform's cloud-based, privacy-protected technology architecture with advances in AI and machine learning makes it easier to find disease early and figure out the best way to treat it.

Right now, Mercy is the only data network partner for Mayo Clinic Platform. However, COO Maneesh Goyal says that by the end of the year, the business hopes to have about a dozen data network partners.

Joe Kelly, EVP of transformation and chief business development officer at Mercy, says that Mercy's partnership with the Mayo Clinic Platform will make it better able to provide personalised, high-quality care.

The right channel can provide diagnostic, preventive, and prognostic treatment in close to real time. So that one of the largest longitudinal clinical data sets can be used with AI and machine learning,

Kelly says, "Our goal is to set up a place where patient information stays safe, secret, and completely unidentifiable."

Goyal says that 35 small and medium-sized health systems are currently part of the Mayo Clinic Care Network when he talks about the "demand" side of the Platform for the network.

Health systems that want to use the Mayo Clinic Network pay a membership fee. This is true for both branded and unbranded affiliations.

This cost gives subscribed provider groups access to Mayo Clinic care protocols, Mayo Clinic clinicians for second opinions and consultations, and Mayo-made tools like the Mayo Clinic Platform.

A key part of a platform network strategy is reciprocity, which is why a data network partner would want to join the Mayo Clinic Platform.

Goyal says that any partner in the data network would sign up because they would then have access to the whole data network.

After the data partners are integrated, the organisations have access to the data from Mayo, and Mayo will also have access to the data from Mercy.

Healthcare Platforms Aplenty

For years, the number of people using healthcare platforms has grown rapidly, and funding has grown along with it.

In 2021, investments in digital health platforms will reach about $12 billion, which will be more than all other digital health investments, which will add up to $8 billion.

Platforms are very good at matching supply and demand for healthcare solutions and services. They can also give many stakeholders a shared technology backbone to make care coordination better.

are what are causing this incredible rise and interest in the market. In essence, platforms can cut down on major transaction costs caused by high fragmentation and reduce information asymmetry by making it easier for information to flow between the different players in the healthcare industry.

Platforms, on the other hand, are hard to build and grow. It takes work, time, money, and a deep understanding of how platform businesses work and how network effects work. There must also be trust.

Mayo Clinic is in a good position to be a trusted business because it has a strong brand name and a good reputation.

But this doesn't mean that no one else is trying to solve problems like these.

A group of 14 health systems will launch Truveta in 2021. It is a big data platform that will hold a lot of information.

Truveta uses machine learning to organise clinical data into an FHIR model so that insights can be gained more quickly. Every day, new information is added to the platform.

Because each organisation in the group has a stake in the business, the group has grown to include 28 organisations.

Terry Myerson, the CEO of Truveta and a former Microsoft executive, says that it was made because of the Covid-19 outbreak and the need for a complete dataset to help healthcare researchers, scientists, academics, and other professionals do their jobs.

Mayo Clinic Platform’s Startup Acceleration Program

A newer part of the business, called Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate, started up in 2022. So that solution developers will come to the platform,

The initiative helps health tech AI startups get ready for the market in a few months. Accepted startups will work with Mayo executives in charge of data to figure out what AI model requirements are.

Examine models for fairness and bias and tell leaders about the process for federal compliance, among other benefits.

Mayo's platform data is also available to programme members so that they can study and test models.

The program's partner relationship manager, Jamie Sundsbak, said of the program's first four participants, "These organisations were able to speed up already great products and services because they had access to large sets of deidentified data and professional guidance."

Seer Medical, a founding cohort member of the Accelerate programme, says that its partnership with the Mayo Clinic led to FDA approval and the U.S. launch of its technology for diagnosing and tracking epilepsy.

As a part of the Accelerate initiative, Seer Medical, which is based in Melbourne, Australia, could use Mayo's data platform and expertise to improve its AI models with an eye towards compliance and keeping things the same. CEO of Seer Dean Freestone says,

At the moment, it takes people with epilepsy an average of five years to find a treatment that works. The company wants to cut this time down to just a few weeks.

The positive results of a domestic clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic led the FDA to approve Seer Medical's technology, the company said.

Problems and chances with the platform model

Both the Mayo Clinic Platform and Truveta are multisided platforms that aim to improve healthcare by making it easier to access data from multiple sources. For both to be successful, they need positive network effects. Even though the plans may be different (e.g., ownership models, monetization plans, participants, etc.) ,

The end goal for each company is to find better, more scalable ways to give safe and secure access to data so that healthcare innovation, research, and discovery can move forward quickly.

Each company is trying to reach this goal by using platform business ideas.

But creating positive network effects is hard, especially in a field like healthcare that is complicated and heavily regulated.

Surescripts is one of the few platform companies in the healthcare industry that has done well. It may be known as the best e-prescribing network in the country now, but that wasn't how it got there.

It spent a lot of money at the beginning on infrastructure, getting people to join, building trust, and showing how mature an ecosystem of partners was from start to finish.

Truveta hopes to solve part of the cold start problem by giving health systems equity ownership to get them to join the platform. Also, in contrast to Mayo,

Truveta has never been secretive about the fact that it sells patient data and makes money from it. Myerson put it this way, "Health systems want to get more money from different sources.

"In the future, data may be used to manage how health systems work.

Since Truveta works with 25 health systems, it seems like the market is responding well to its strategy.

On the other hand, the Mayo Clinic Platform might only be building its platform with the future in mind.

Mayo Clinic Platform stands out because it works with nference, a "construction partner" that provides de-identification technologies that are important to the "data behind glass" strategy.

Halamka says that the blinding data on Mayo's network stays within the federated network and isn't sent out to be held by outsiders. "We believe very strongly that everyone should keep and hold on to their own data," he says.

Data aggregation is usually a good idea, but organisations must be careful to respect patients' wishes and do it in a way that protects both the data and the patients' privacy.

Halamka also says that the Mayo Clinic Platform is different because of the depth and breadth of the data it collects. This makes it easier for data network partners to contribute data, which in turn attracts solution developers.

This difference is very important in the early stages of a platform, before the "flywheel effect."

Mayo also lets participants "white label" other platform solutions. This is done to increase interest, get more people involved, and create network effects.

Creating data networks in different ways shouldn't stop people from working together, though.

There are many ways to tackle these problems, and partnerships can be a very effective way to boost the group work that is already going on across different networks.

"People can work with us in any way they want," Halamka said about the Mayo Clinic Platform.

We're willing to let them take care of it themselves if all they want is our advice or playbook. It is fine if they want to give information. We think it's important to finish this assignment.