A Mayo Clinic Platform Conference Worth Celebrating

Bringing together data network partners, solution developers, and provider organizations produced actionable insights that will reinvent the healthcare ecosystem.

By John Halamka, M.D., President, Mayo Clinic Platform, and Paul Cerrato, senior research analyst and communications specialist, Mayo Clinic Platform. 

On September 19 and 20, Mayo Clinic Platform gathered thought leaders in digital health to our annual conference, held this year in Scottsdale, Arizona. The conference included 250 leaders from Mayo Clinic Platform data network partners, solution developers, provider organizations, investors, policymakers, and payers. The resulting dialogue was magic. 

Our speakers were dynamic, our attendees were engaged, and our social time gave us the opportunity to build lasting relationships. Alicia Chong Rodriguez, an engineer and inventor who is the founder of Bloomer Tech, opened up our meeting with a description of her journey from a childhood in Costa Rica to an engineer at MIT to her current role as the CIO of a digital health company that designs wearable technologies for women with cardiovascular disease. 

In other presentations, we gained Insights from Eric Schmidt, Co-Founder of Schmidt Futures and the former CEO & Chairman of Google; Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., M.P.P., the National Coordinator Health Information Technology, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT; and Hemant Taneja, CEO & Managing Director of General Catalyst. All three validated our platform thinking approach. Our experts also recognized the need to collect the world's healthcare data, empower innovators to create new products, and deliver solutions to patients, including those who have no access to specialty care.   

Attendees also benefited from contributions from Mayo Clinic Care Network members, who discussed new opportunities to improve patient care through early disease detection and clinical decision support solutions provided by Mayo Clinic Platform. Care Network members made it clear that the network is changing from a one-sided market, in which Mayo Clinic provides e-consults, tumor boards, and other services, to a two-sided market in which we deploy AI together, measure its impact, and capture the benefits of adoption.

It's impossible to do justice to all the insights and shared wisdom coming from our speakers and audience, but a few highlights are worth sharing:

• We need to think globally and ensure the innovation and solutions work for large healthcare institutions, regional health systems and hospitals, and community health workers.
• We have a societal imperative to ensure that rural hospitals and their patients are represented, otherwise we perpetuate access bias.
• We may need to deploy AI algorithms to monitor emerging AI-based solutions for bias and performance drift as these systems become more complex.
• Generative AI is uniquely different given the generalized problems it can be used to address, in contrast to most predictive AI tools, which have much more narrow uses.
• Some patient populations have an aversion to AI given the broader discourse and perception of AI.
• To create safe, effective AI-driven tools, we need to recognize that patients don’t fall into simple buckets like Caucasian, Asian, and African American. The evidence suggests these algorithms will have to recognize the diversification of our patients’ genetic backgrounds, where they live, and their behavior.
• The most practical use case for large language models seems to be writing with empathy.
• We understand that each of our organizations is on a journey of leveraging these technologies and there are many onramps to this journey.

The key message from the conference is that we must address these issues — and many others — as a community in which every participant benefits from the presence of every other participant. That’s the very definition of a platform.