Exploring Mayo Clinic's digital health innovation platform
Mayo Clinic Platform_Solutions Studio uses a federated 'data behind glass' approach to help developers and health systems build robust, secure digital health solutions.
Digital transformation has become a major priority across the healthcare industry with the rise of advanced technologies like AI. But building and integrating these tools presents unique hurdles -- including data-related challenges, AI transparency and health equity concerns -- for health systems and digital health companies.
Tackling these issues is crucial for successful digital health solution commercialization and adoption, but the complexities of each make the process lengthy and costly.
To spur innovation in this area, Mayo Clinic Platform recently launched Solutions Studio, a program designed to accelerate digital health solutions' development, validation and integration into healthcare workflows.
In an interview, Steve Bethke, vice president of the solution developer market at Mayo Clinic Platform, detailed how Solutions Studio helps overcome some common digital health solution development obstacles and how stakeholders can utilize the platform.
The challenges of digital health solution development
Bethke highlighted that solution developers have no shortage of ideas about how to solve potential problems for healthcare providers. However, bringing these ideas into the real world requires addressing multiple considerations.
"The first is data -- [solution developers] need access to high-quality comprehensive representative data that can be used," he explained, noting that computing power and data science tools are also necessary to enable data-driven discovery and model development.
"Once I do that work and build a model, I need to validate it. How does it perform in terms of sensitivity, specificity, bias?" Bethke indicated. "Now that I've done all that work, I've just begun because I now have to deploy the solution into workflows."
Mayo Clinic Platform operates in a de-identified federated model, which we refer to as 'data behind glass.' That means that the data doesn't leave the [Solutions Studio] environment. Developers can come into a secure environment, access the relevant data to do their work and then, the solution can be taken out, but the data doesn't leave. This allows access to the data to innovate, but also ensures data security and privacy.
Steve BethkeVice president of solution developer market, Mayo Clinic Platform
He emphasized that deployment, commercialization, and adoption are major pain points of digital health innovation, which Solutions Studio aims to address.
Bethke further underscored that to achieve this, developers of AI-enabled healthcare solutions must have access to broad and deep data. Solutions Studio supports this data-centric approach by enabling a data behind glass federated approach.
"Mayo Clinic Platform operates in a de-identified federated model, which we refer to as data behind glass," he said. "That means the data doesn't leave the [Solutions Studio] environment. Developers can come into a secure environment and access the relevant data to do their work. Then, the solution can be taken out, but the data doesn't leave. This allows access to the data to innovate, but also ensures data security and privacy."
Bethke indicated that this federated data behind glass approach allows solution developers to train models on diverse data sets and drive better, higher-performing solutions.
To do so, the solution is designed to provide connectivity and security across the development and validation processes.
The combination of data connectivity and a federated, secure environment helps users more effectively navigate the model development process. A host of other tools, including Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover, Mayo Clinic Platform_Validate and Mayo Clinic Platform_Deploy, further streamline each step.
Bethke noted that Solutions Studio is meant to provide end-to-end offerings to support solution developers at any stage of the development and commercialization journey.
"We meet the solution developers where they are in the life cycle," he stated. "So, if they're early in the discovery phase, they can access data and tools to build their solution and validate it before moving on. They can come onto the platform and get access to the necessary tools -- in this case, [Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover] -- via Solutions Studio, solve that problem and move through that lifecycle. Similarly, if a solution developer is more mature and has a solution, they can go directly to qualification and deployment into the Mayo Clinic Platform ecosystem."
While meeting developers where they are can be useful for driving innovation, healthcare providers face the challenge of navigating the complexities of technology development to find potential solutions for their most pressing use cases.
To that end, Solutions Studio is designed to provide transparency to end users.
"Think about it like a nutrition label, so the end users can make informed decisions," Bethke explained. "The qualification process includes evaluation from teams of physicians, data scientists and AI experts. They look at a number of criteria depending on what the particular solution does -- an administrative solution might be different than a [clinical decision support] solution."
The platform can help developers determine a solution's performance in terms of factors such as sensitivity, specificity, and generalizability.
"For healthcare providers, there's a lot of noise in the system. It's complicated. How do they know they need more information?" he posed.
"In the end, it's really about giving more information and transparency to the healthcare providers so they can make more informed decisions … Mayo Clinic Platform_Solution Studio is about unlocking innovation," he continued.
Balancing innovation with transparency across digital health solutions is critical for driving innovation, Bethke indicated.
"We are unlocking innovation for solution developers with powerful capabilities and then providing transparency to healthcare providers so they can make far better decisions," he underscored. "That's what we're focused on because everybody will form opinions about what's good, what's bad, how can somebody make money and how can they not."
For that reason, Mayo Clinic Platform leadership is focused on how Solutions Studio can provide capabilities and transparency.
"That's the right way to drive meaningful change," Bethke stated.
Use cases and the future
The focus on providing transparency and connectivity within an open platform has enabled Solutions Studio users to pursue a variety of use cases.
"By providing key capabilities to solution developers, they can innovate across a wide range of offerings," Bethke explained. "So we have clinical solutions, like image-based cancer detection tools. There are ambient listening solutions that are attempting to lower the clinical documentation burden. There are administrative solutions driving efficiencies in complicated processes like scheduling or coding."
"Considering use cases is relevant to how we think about [digital health innovation]," he continued. "So many times, someone will have a cool, clinical solution that solves a problem. That's fantastic, but there might also be an administrative solution that just makes scheduling easier and faster. Well, that's not super sexy, but boy, is it relevant."
Bethke further indicated that supporting solution developers looking at both sophisticated clinical solutions as well as administrative ones has the potential to help solve some of healthcare's biggest problems.
"In the short term, we're going to be underwhelmed on AI. Long term, it's going to do even more than we think," he said. " Will it replace doctors? No, I think of it as augmented intelligence -- this is going to help doctors and clinicians be faster, better … [AI] is really an additive technology."
Shania Kennedy has been covering news related to health IT and analytics since 2022.
