Platforms have long been upending industries, including healthcare, and are uniquely positioned to address the complex issues that plague the sector.
The quest for platform disruption is personal for Dr. John Halamka, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, and he is placing a lot of faith in Mayo Clinic to lead the charge.
Pioneering scientists have always been motivated to conduct research, make scientific discoveries, and advance medicine despite sparse, imperfect, and frequently confusing data.
For instance, in the middle of the 1800s, when cholera was rife in London, it took the tenacity and brilliance of research scientist John Snow to overlay death data on maps of the city and pinpoint tainted wastewater as the primary cause of the epidemics in England.
With only a little amount of data, few resources, and no help from technology, this was a huge finding.
Rewind to the present day. Health-related data make up at least one-third of all data generated globally.
With this much information at our disposal, the thought of combining it for research purposes in a way that can significantly reduce costs and lengthen someone's life or enhance their health is highly appealing. One of the greatest ways to do this is through platforms that combine healthcare data.
John Halamka, MD, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform and a lifelong advocate for health IT, made a comment that really struck a chord with me during a recent discussion about what has been happening at the Mayo Clinic Platform since its inception in 2019.
According to Halamka, "I want to leave this world in a place where my daughter benefits from all the patients who came before her every time she receives a treatment."
As a father and health IT expert, I can attest to Dr. Halamka's admirable commitment to the growth of health technology and his inspiring vision for what the Mayo Clinic Platform can achieve.
What is the Mayo Clinic Platform?
The Mayo Clinic Platform is referred to be a "route" for health care innovations that can alter how healthcare organisations and doctors deliver treatment on its website.
With the aim of enhancing clinical care and operational workflows, in part through advanced uses of AI and machine learning, the Mayo Clinic Platform is a marketplace that links its participating members to a range of Mayo Clinic Network goods, services, and solutions.
The Mayo Clinic's president and chief executive officer, Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., thinks what the company is creating should serve as a model for other businesses hoping to similarly improve healthcare.
Everyone will approach this slightly differently. We are merely the forerunners. Farrugia stated, "We're supplying the playbook.
The Mayo Clinic's president and CEO since 2019, Farrugia, who has worked there for over 29 years, argues that there needs to be a move from pipeline business thinking to a platform perspective.
The pipeline approach, which Farrugia claims is still the default, is being gradually replaced by platform thinking at Mayo Clinic and through the Mayo Clinic Platform.
Healthcare needs a paradigm shift, and we need to explain and demonstrate how this works so people can realise how revolutionary it can be," said the author.
The Mayo Clinic Platform allows for advanced data analytics to be conducted on (and artificial intelligence algorithms to be trained on) de-identified data using what Halamka refers to as a "data behind glass" approach.
The information originates from the extensive body of published clinical research and scientific literature, as well as from the network of Mayo Clinic and other platform partner organisations.
Mayo Clinic Platform partners can securely use deidentified data from a single, centralised location, behind the proverbial glass, while accounting for data privacy, security, and access rights thanks to the platform's federated architecture.
Maneesh Goyal, chief operating officer of Mayo Clinic Platform, says that at the end of the day, "we're trying to take all of the components of the entire healthcare value chain, which is incredibly fragmented and messy for solutions developers, and compress them because that's how platforms operate and that's how innovation happens."
Halamka was optimistic about the promise and possibilities of platform disruption in healthcare when the Mayo Clinic Platform first launched in 2019.
The growing digitalization of health care is giving us an unheard-of opportunity to address complicated medical problems and enhance people's lives on a worldwide scale, he claimed. "Platform business models have been a driver of disruption in many sectors."
Three years later, he still has the same enthusiasm. "Of any organisation I've ever worked with, I believe Mayo Clinic has the best potential of truly triggering this fundamental transformation in how healthcare is given internationally," says the author.
A Three-Sided, Federated Platform
In-depth analysis of the Mayo Clinic Platform's business model reveals 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 using Mayo Clinic Platform products and data to train and validate AI models), and healthcare service providers (organisations looking to purchase solutions that have been verified by Mayo Clinic Platform's data).
The underpinning technological infrastructure required to run the Platform is provided in part by another group of partners, referred to internally at Mayo Clinic as "building partners."
In a unique relationship that Halamka defined as "eliminating the hurdles to innovation in health care by bringing together data and human expertise through a new method of working together," Mayo Clinic signed its first data network health system partner, Mercy, in July 2022.
In Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Mercy has medical offices, outpatient facilities, urgent care centres, and acute care facilities.
More than 2,100 Mercy main and specialty care doctors, as well as 600 advanced practitioners, are employed by the company across 300 sites.
As early users of integrated EHRs, Mayo and Mercy both have a wealth of clinical and outcome data that can be used for analysis and AI treatment.
The firms emphasised in the 2022 announcement that the combination of the privacy-protected, cloud-based technology architecture of the Mayo Clinic Platform with advances in AI and machine learning makes it simpler to detect disease sooner and identify the best treatment options.
Mercy is the sole data network partner for Mayo Clinic Platform as of right now, but COO Maneesh Goyal says the business anticipates having about a dozen data network partners by the end of the year.
According to Joe Kelly, EVP of transformation and chief business development officer at Mercy, Mercy's collaboration with the Mayo Clinic Platform will improve its capacity to provide individualised,
prognosticative, and preventive treatment in close to real time through the right channel. In order to use artificial intelligence and machine learning on one of the largest longitudinal clinical data sets,
Kelly explains, "our objective is to establish an environment where patient information remains secure, secret, and entirely deidentified."
Goyal points out that there are 35 small- to midsize health systems currently a part of the Mayo Clinic Care Network when discussing the network's "demand" side of the Platform.
Health systems pay a membership fee to use Mayo Clinic Network through both branded and unbranded affiliations.
The Mayo Clinic care protocols, Mayo Clinic clinicians for second opinions and consultations, as well as access to tools created at Mayo, such as Mayo Clinic Platform, are all made available to subscribing provider groups through this cost.
The motivation behind a data network partner joining the Mayo Clinic Platform is based on reciprocity, a key component of a platform network strategy.
According to Goyal, the reason any data network partner would sign up is because they would gain access to the entire data network once they did.
Following the integration of the data partners, the organisations have access to Mayo data, and Mayo will also have access to Mercy data.
Healthcare Platforms Aplenty
Healthcare platforms have been exploding in popularity for years, and funding has followed suit.
In 2021, investments in digital health platforms will reach around $12 billion, exceeding all other digital health investments (platforms and non-platforms) which will total $8 billion.
Platforms' exceptional ability to match supply and demand for healthcare solutions and services, as well as their ability to give many stakeholders a shared technology backbone in order to better care coordination,
are what are driving this phenomenal upsurge and market interest. Platforms, in essence, can reduce major transaction costs brought on by high fragmentation and diminish information asymmetry by enhancing information flows among the various stakeholders in the healthcare industry.
Platforms, however, are difficult to create and grow. It requires effort, time, money, and a thorough knowledge of platform business strategies and network effects. Trust is also necessary.
Mayo Clinic is in a good position to take on the role of a trusted operator since it benefits from strong brand awareness and a solid reputation.
However, this does not imply that nobody else is working to solve comparable issues.
Truveta, a massive data platform established by a group of 14 health systems, will be introduced in 2021.
For quicker insights, Truveta employs machine learning to organise clinical data into an FHIR model. The platform is updated every day with fresh information.
Due to the fact that each member organisation has an equity part in the business, the group has grown to include 28 organisations today.
Truveta was created in reaction to the Covid-19 outbreak and the necessity for a comprehensive dataset to aid healthcare researchers, scientists, academia, and other professionals in their work, according to Terry Myerson, CEO of Truveta and a former executive at Microsoft.
Mayo Clinic Platform’s Startup Acceleration Program
The business's more recent division, called Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate, began operations in 2022. In order to lure solution developers to the platform,
The initiative assists early-stage health tech AI firms in becoming market-ready in a few months. Accepted startups will collaborate with Mayo data executives to assess AI model requirements,
Examine models for fairness and bias, and inform leaders about the federal compliance procedure, among other advantages.
For the purpose of studying and validating models, programme members also get access to Mayo's platform data.
With access to comprehensive deidentified data sets and professional guidance, the program's partner relationship manager, Jamie Sundsbak, said of the program's initial four participants, "These organisations were able to take already excellent products and services and accelerate them."
Amazingly, Seer Medical, a founding cohort member of the Accelerate programme, attributes its FDA clearance and subsequent U.S. debut of its epilepsy diagnosis and monitoring technology to its partnership with the Mayo Clinic.
Seer Medical, situated in Melbourne, Australia, could use Mayo's data platform and expertise as a participant in the Accelerate initiative to improve its AI models with an eye toward compliance and maintaining the status quo. According to Seer CEO Dean Freestone,
it currently takes patients with epilepsy five years on average to find a successful treatment strategy. The business hopes to cut that time down to a few weeks.
The FDA decided to approve Seer Medical's technology based on the positive outcomes of a domestic clinical trial that was finished at the Mayo Clinic, the company said.
Challenges And Opportunities of the Platform Model
Both the Mayo Clinic Platform and Truveta are multisided platforms that aim to improve healthcare by facilitating aggregated access to data, and both depend on positive network effects to be successful. While the strategies may differ (e.g., ownership models, monetization plans, participants, etc.),
The end goal for each company is to find scalable, more effective ways to enable safe and secure access to data in order to enable quick advancements in healthcare innovation, research, and discovery.
Each company is using platform business concepts to try and achieve this end goal.
But establishing positive network effects is challenging, particularly in a complicated and heavily regulated sector like healthcare.
Surescripts is one of the few examples of a platform firm that has succeeded in the healthcare industry. It may currently be known as the country's leading e-prescribing network, but that wasn't how it got there.
It invested a lot of money up front on infrastructure, participant recruiting, trust-building, and demonstrating the maturity of an ecosystem of partners from start to finish.
By granting equity ownership to health systems in order to entice them to join the platform, Truveta hopes to partially solve the cold start issue. Additionally, unlike Mayo,
Truveta has been open about the fact that it sells and makes money from the patient data that is stored on its platform. As Myerson put it, "Health systems want to diversify their revenue streams.
" The management of health systems' operations in the future may include data.
Truveta has 25 health system partners, therefore the market looks to be responding well to its strategy.
The Mayo Clinic Platform, on the other hand, might only be building its platform with the long term in mind.
One way Mayo Clinic Platform sets itself apart is through its association with nference, a "construction partner" that offers de-identification technologies essential to the "data behind glass" strategy.
The blinding data on Mayo's network stays within the federated network rather than being transferred out to and held by outsiders, according to Halamka, who adds that "we believe very firmly that everyone should preserve and hold on to their own data."
Aggregating data is generally a good idea, but organisations must take special care to respect patient wishes and do it in a way that respects both the data and privacy interests.
Halamka also cites the depth and breadth of data that the Mayo Clinic Platform is collecting as a difference, making it simpler for data network partners to contribute data and, as a result, luring solution developers.
In the early stages of a platform, before "the flywheel effect," this difference is particularly crucial.
In order to increase interest, involvement, and create network effects, Mayo also allows participants to white label other platform solutions.
The creation of data networks using various methods should not, however, prevent collaboration.
There is opportunity for multiple platforms to address these issues, and partnerships can be a highly effective approach to amp up the group effort taking place across various networks.
According to Halamka, "People can cooperate with us any way they choose" at the Mayo Clinic Platform.
We are willing to let them handle it themselves if they only want to use our expertise or playbook. It's okay if they wish to provide data. We consider completing this assignment to be crucial.
Comments
Post a Comment