Becker's Hospital Review

February 2022 Issue of Becker's Hospital Review

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32 INNOVATION Mayo Clinic CIO Cris Ross : Google partnership will 'transform healthcare' By Katie Adams I n 2019, Mayo Clinic began a 10-year strategic partnership with Google focused on innovation and cloud computing. Here, Cris Ross, the Rochester, Minn.-based system's CIO, provides updates on what the partner- ship has accomplished and where it's going. Note: Responses were edited lightly for clarity and style. Question: How did Mayo Clinic choose Google as its innovation and cloud computing partner? Cris Ross: We wanted to join together with an organization that believed in our vision for how to cure, connect and transform healthcare so people get the care they expect and deserve. Aer a detailed process, the team chose Google based on its talent and technology as well as our shared vision for the future of healthcare. Google's focus on innovation and commitment to excellence and security made it the right partner to help us transform healthcare. Q: If you could distill the partnership down to one goal, what would that be? CR: is partnership will change how care is delivered and will help us grow as a health- care organization. Patients will benefit as we improve and discover new ways of providing their care. Q: How has the partnership already advanced the system's innovation and virtual care initiatives? CR: e first stage in our partnership is to build Mayo Clinic Cloud on the Google Cloud plat- form. In partnership with them, we have begun to populate Mayo Clinic Cloud with data and have constructed an AI factory which is being used by nearly 200 teams to advance scientif- ic discoveries with AI tools. We expect to see many new algorithms to improve care coming from the AI factory. We will complete construc- tion of Mayo Clinic Cloud in early 2023. A second, equally important part of our part- nership is our joint research and innovation program. For example, Mayo and Google teams are working together to develop a new way to ex- pedite and improve quality for radiation therapy planning, a critical component of cancer care. Together, we have found ways to more accurate- ly and safely deliver radiation therapies through better planning and targeting. Our initial work has been in head and neck cancers, a complex area for radiation therapy, but we are expanding it into other cancers. When available, this tech- nology will benefit far more than Mayo Clinic patients through Mayo Clinic Platform and could improve quality and access to complex radiation therapy — anywhere. Q: In which ways will Mayo Clinic's partnership with Google advance the system's innovation and virtual care ini- tiatives in the years to come? CR: Our main goal is to benefit patients, and thanks to technology and the Mayo Clinic Platform business model, we will be able to do this at scale and truly transform health- care. One stream of work will be for Mayo Clinic scientists and our partners to use data to improve care of our patients. A second stream of work will be to develop algorithms which could be used at Mayo Clinic and else- where. A third stream of work will be collab- orating with Google on projects beyond the capabilities of our scientists alone. Q: How has Mayo Clinic leveraged Google's technology to improve its ability to conduct medical research? CR: Mayo Clinic Cloud includes a repository of de-identified longitudinal patient records which we have constructed with Google and our partner Nference. Mayo Clinic Platform Discover product line provides access to those high-quality, comprehensive, longi- tudinal de-identified patient data that few in the industry can offer. Mayo Clinic Plat- form's principal partner, Nference, is already using this data with life sciences companies for drug discovery. In addition to applying sophisticated de-identification methods, we have also applied advanced techniques to se- cure this data, and data never leaves the Mayo Clinic Cloud. is repository of de-identified data is also used by internal researchers. Q: Why should all hospitals understand the importance of machine learning in improving treatment precision and clin- ical outcomes? CR: Not every hospital will develop algo- rithms based on machine learning, but all of them will use them. Most already are today — voice transcription replacing dictation, computer-aided claims coding and sepsis Renown inks remote patient- monitoring deal for in-hospital & at-home care By Katie Adams R eno, Nev.-based Renown Health on Dec. 6, 2021, partnered with Bio- Intellisense, a remote patient-monitoring company, to improve in-hospi- tal and at-home care through the use of the company's on-body sensor. Under the partnership, Renown will integrate BioIntellisense's BioStick- er device to continuously monitor vital signs and deliver insights to clini- cians. The sensor monitors patients' skin temperature, resting heart rate and respiratory rate, step, gait, sleep, activity levels and more. It also flags infection- like symptoms to support COVID-19 monitoring. During the partnership's first phase, all patients admitted to Renown South Meadows Medical Center in Reno will wear the sensor. Patients can continue to wear it when they leave for their homes, ambulatory, outpatient surgical, rehabilitation or skilled nursing settings. Analytics produced by the sensor will be visualized and monitored by clini- cians working at Renown's transfer and operations center. The partnership will help personalize care and address healthcare workforce shortages, Renown said in a news release. n

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