Becker's Hospital Review

24 INNOVATION Pandemic sped up Mayo's digital transformation by 10 years, Dr. John Halamka says By Laura Dyrda J ohn Halamka, MD, joined Rochester, Minn.- based Mayo Clinic in January to lead the health system's digital transformation as president of Mayo Clinic Platform. e health system had outlined a 10-year plan to har- ness patient data to provide better patient care. Its initiatives aim to use technology and artificial intelli- gence to inform the patient experience and develop an integrated medical platform. e health system has 30 petabytes of patient data, 25 million tissue samples and 30 million pathology slides, which it aims to combine with deidentified patient records and medical literature allowing physicians and clinicians to provide personal- ized medicine. e health system had planned to realize its full vision over the next 10 years, but the COVID-19 pandemic sped up its timeline. "We were talking about healthcare in 2030," Dr. Halam- ka said in a Mayo report. "But what we are seeing now is that 2030 is going to arrive in 2021 because COVID-19 has reshaped the culture and the policy around the use of technology, and anything we thought would take a decade to do is going to be an expectation for next year." "We're going to have more demand for telemedicine, telehealth, hospital-level care in the home, wearables and the ability to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to new data sources for cure plans. at's going to be here very soon because we have changed so much, so fast with COVID-19," he said. e health system is focusing initially on its virtu- al care clinical data analytics and remote diagnostics and management platforms as well as ways to develop actionable insights from wearables data. It is building policies, technology and infrastructure to support these initiatives while also protecting patient privacy. Mayo is using its cloud partnership with Google for the plat- form activities and investing in data organization and computing capabilities. Mayo Clinic Platform has 11 layers of protection and ensures all data used in its initiatives is deidentified. Dr. Halamka also mentioned precision medicine as an im- portant goal. "We're going to figure out what works and make those technologies available to the world," he said. n MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital design reusable N95 mask By Katie Adams B ioengineers at Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology teamed up in July with clinicians at Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital to design N95 masks that can be sterilized for reuse. As healthcare professionals nationwide struggled to obtain suf- ficient personal protective equipment during the pandemic, MIT bioengineers created a sustainable prototype using sterilizable materials. Their model is known as the Injection Molded Autoclav- able, Scalable, Conformable system, and its preliminary testing re- sults are published in the British Medical Journal Open. The team used injection molding with silicone rubber that can tol- erate up to 572 degrees to create the mask, adding elastic straps and two replaceable filters that guard against solid particles. They also used 3D imaging to ensure the masks could fit a variety of face shapes and sizes and tested several sterilization techniques, none of which produced any significant differences compared to the pre-sterilized mask. "We wanted to create a mask that could be easily sterilized and reused for several reasons. Not only is this important because of disruptions to the supply chain, but also disposable masks, gloves and other PPE can cause a tremendous amount of litter," Adam Wentworth, one of the product's engineers, said in a July 8 news release. n Henry Ford Health System pilots no- touch digital health screening kiosks By Jackie Drees D etroit-based Henry Ford Health System launched a pilot of 10 digital health screening kiosks, which can capture and monitor vital signs without touching the individual, accord- ing to a July 20 Detroit Free Press report. The health system's innovation institute teamed up with NuVision Technology to begin the pilot in mid-July. The kiosks feature no- touch screening monitors that can take a person's temperature via retina scans and allows people to answer questions about their COVID-19 status and symptoms. "In this time of social distancing, and avoiding large crowds, we said, 'How can we create a screening process that is contactless?'" Brie Riley, project manager at the innovation institute, told the De- troit Free Press. The project aims to reduce the number of medical staff that conduct health screenings at the entrances of its buildings. However, if some- one has COVID-19 symptoms or a fever that the kiosk detects, there will be an attendant to direct them to the appropriate place, according to the report. "We don't want to turn anybody away, but we need to find out what is the best way to keep everyone safe," Ms. Riley said. n

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