Mayo Clinic, 2bPrecise partners to establish genomics-based CDS tools

The Mayo Clinic will work with a precision medicine company to establish and research a genomics-based care protocols approach. The renowned delivery system has signed a license contract with 2bPrecise, a Pittsburgh-based company that gives an EHR-agnostic cloud-based precision medicine platform.

The partners will utilize the 2bPrecise platform and combine it with Mayo Clinic’s knowledge and electronic phenotyping algorithms to further establish clinical protocols, which will be incorporated into the platform.

Initial work will be utilized to apply research to measure outcomes in sufferers who have cardiovascular genetic disease.

The two agencies will start their collaboration by bringing Mayo Clinic's algorithm for FH into the 2bPrecise platform to derive insights from combined clinical and genomic research information. The collaboration targets to boost clinical researchers with the capability to test and validate new protocols based on clinical-genomic insights, with the ultimate aim of making these protocols available for optimized decision-making at the point of care.

The 2bPrecise platform harmonizes clinical and genomic data to extract patient-specific insights and present them in an actionable way to the clinician, within their present EHR workflow, overlaying knowledge sources to instruct and enable clinical genomics at point of care.

Executives of 2bPrecise claim that they selected Mayo Clinic for this work due to their strong subject matter expertise and work in the area of clinical genomics, particularly their research in familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), and for their desire to share their care algorithms more broadly with the medical community.

“Mayo Clinic has a very robust genomics research discipline,” claims Assaf Halevy, founder and CEO of 2bPrecise. “We’re excited to collaborate with premier agencies such as Mayo Clinic to advance genomic science and help make it clinically actionable.”

Mayo Clinic has a financial interest in the technology, with executives saying they plan to use any revenue it gets to support its not-for-profit mission in patient care, education and research.

 

Mayo Clinic leverages analytics to reduce test overutilization

To assist its providers know what laboratory tests to order and when, the Mayo Clinic is utilizing analytics to decrease the test overutilization and unnecessary healthcare charges.

Inefficient clinical laboratory test utilization cannot merely increase costs but can negatively affect the patient safety and quality of care, in accordance to Daniel Boettcher, senior programmer and analyst at the Mayo Clinic’s laboratory in Rochester, Minnesota.

Although, the Mayo Clinic has embraced clinical laboratory test utilization management to trace provider ordering patterns to recognize areas where performance can be improved and to stop providers from ordering tests that do not benefit patient outcomes.

That is where analytics come into play—assisting to decrease the unnecessary testing and improve utilization management by suggesting approaches for diagnoses of particular diseases, guiding selection of the correct tests, and helping in the treatment and monitoring of patient care.

“Over the last 4 years or so, we have been working to transform the way we give analytics services to the laboratories here,” claims Boettcher.

Instead of building a laboratory-focused analytics platform in-house, the Mayo Clinic decided to partner with an outside vendor, due to the work demands that such a project would place on its in-house IT team of analysts, developers and programmers, as well as the complications engaged in such a project. Mayo Medical Laboratories and Mayo’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology (DLMP), one of the world’s greatest clinical laboratories conducting more than 27 million tests yearly, opted healthcare analytics company Viewics to serve as their analytics platform.

Among other capabilities, the Viewics Utilization Management solution observes physician peer-to-peer test ordering patterns; offers peer-to-peer utilization reports to physicians; and recognizes the most costly tests and those providers with the highest send-out rates.

“With self-service reporting, we’re really putting the data in the hands of the users,” analyzes Boettcher. “They have straight access to it. Nobody is in their way.”

Additionally, the software assists to manage laboratory test utilization problem areas, like removing clinically obsolete tests, decreasing clinically duplicative testing, and identifying and changing tests with confusing or similar codes.

For those hospitals and health systems searching to implement and use analytics to drive organizational initiatives, Boettcher asserts that developing an analytics-driven culture is critical in which the data flowing into an agency is transformed into information that can be used to make actionable decisions.

Boettcher points out that “getting information into the system requires being managed just as carefully—if not more carefully—than getting information out of the system.” He makes the case that “if we do not get good quality information put into the system, we cannot get good quality information out of the system.”

“At the Mayo Clinic, it meant taking a strategic approach to developing a culture of analytics,” he summarizes, adding that it is about “ingraining into the laboratory staff and their procedures the value of analytics so that it is part of their everyday, regular workflow and operations.”

 

Mayo Clinic utilizes emergency telemedicine for newborn resuscitations interventions

The Mayo Clinic is utilizing emergency video telemedicine to effectively help community hospitals less familiar with modern newborn resuscitation interventions during high-risk, complex deliveries.

Mayo’s Division of Neonatal Medicine previously provided newborn telemedicine consultations to 6 of its health system sites, where regional care teams used wireless tablets running HIPAA-compliant video conferencing software from Vidyo to interact with neonatologists at Mayo in Rochester, Minn. Video consults are now conducted at all ten of Mayo’s health system sites that deliver babies in the Rochester region.

The technology integrates neonatologists to “visually assess the babies and co-handle them together with local care teams more efficiently utilizing video and better communication,” claims Jennifer Fang, MD, a Mayo Clinic fellow in neonatal-perinatal medicine. “With telemedicine now, we are capable to bring our neonatologists to the bedside remotely to really assist guide to these local care teams with complex deliveries.”

Mayo Receives $142M to Make Precision Medicine Initiative Biobank

NIH has granted $142 million to Mayo Clinic to establish the world’s largest biobank as part of the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has declared that it will provide $142 million over 5 years to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to create the world’s largest biobank as part of the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program.

The award will assist the Mayo Clinic gather, store, and distribute biospecimens for precision medicine research. The funding will help to advance the Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to collect healthcare data on over one million participants.

“This range of data at the scale of 1 million people will be an unprecedented resource for researchers working to understand all the factors that influence health and disease,” said Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, NIH Director. “The more we understand about individual differences, the better able we will be to tailor the prevention and treatment of illness.”

Suicidal thoughts more likely to plague surgeons

Surgeons have thoughts of suicide at a rate that is more than double that of the general population, yet few seek psychiatric or psychological help because of concerns that doing so will affect the status of their medical license, according to a report in the Archives of Surgery.

Among the 7,905 surgeons surveyed via e-mail by researchers from the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere, 502 (6.3%) said they had had thoughts of suicide at some point in the previous 12 months, as compared with 3.3% of the general population of the U.S., according to the report.

Of those who thought about suicide, only 130 (26%) sought professional help, while 301 (60.1%) said specifically that they didn't seek help because of license concerns. The report noted that 80% of state medical boards ask about mental illness on license applications, and 47% do so on renewal applications.

Working more than 40 hours a week and having a greater frequency of being on overnight call led to more-frequent thoughts of suicide, but one of the highest factors contributing to suicidal thoughts was having experienced a major medical error. Among surgeons who said they had a major medical error in the three months before the survey, 16.2% reported having suicidal thoughts in the previous year, compared with 5.4% among those not reporting an error.

The researchers also noted several ways in which surgeons do not fit common suicidal profiles. Among physicians, the report said surgeons appear to have the lowest rates of substance abuse and dependency. Surgeons also are highly educated and "nearly universally employed," and 88% are married—all factors that reduce suicide risk in the general population, according to the report.

The report concluded that more study is needed to be able to identify why surgeons have higher rates of suicidal thoughts and how to lower barriers to using mental health services.

"We are human; to err is inevitable; and suicide is not the right answer for those tormented by the expectation of perfection," University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine physicians Dr. Kelly McCoy and Dr. Sally Carty said in a commentary accompanying the report.