Mercy’s 10-year partnership with Mayo Clinic focused on improving patient outcomes

Mercy and the Mayo Clinic are now partners.

The two healthcare giants recently announced a 10-year agreement that will see them pool and share information and data about the best paths for diagnoses, treatments, and patient outcomes.

“For too long, healthcare has been so reactive,” says Dr. John Mohart, cardiologist and president of Mercy communities. “As patients and physicians, we wait. You have symptoms and you come in with problems, and we try to solve them as providers to help you get on the best care path. But we want to be more proactive and predictive in our approach, and therefore find disease earlier when it’s easier to treat and get better outcomes. By looking at and analyzing data together, we’ll be able to determine that.”

Although healthcare systems have long received reams of data from patients, not much of it has been organized in helpful ways. Mohart believes the partnership will allow the two entities to work with better information that will make understanding a patient’s situation much more streamlined. “Bringing that together will help us create these insights,” Mohart says. “We can aggregate that data and then develop care paths or best treatment options from that.”

One example of how things will work is Mercy’s approach to patients who have been diagnosed with diabetes, as well as those who are at risk for the disease. Mohart says the hospital uses software bots to analyze electronic medical records and determine which patients need medicines or blood tests. The software then automatically reaches out to patients via text to inform them, rather than making them come into the office to talk through it.

By leveraging the relevant data and patterns presented through machine learning and AI-powered systems that regularly update and adjust, physicians will ideally diagnose problems quicker, leading to more efficient treatment, shorter hospital stays, less expensive care, and higher patient satisfaction. “Physicians will be able to ask questions that they’re interested in because of their patients, but also [these systems] will provide us information that will help guide our providers to get patients on the best treatment path or an earlier diagnosis on a complex problem that they haven’t seen before,” Mohart says.

As a cardiologist who may see a certain condition only a handful of times in his career, Mohart says that having access to physician and patient data from around the country allows him to learn from and implement treatment and diagnoses in a more effective manner.

“It’s really democratizing specialty care,” he says. “Whether you’re in a big city or a small town, you would get that level of care that you’d expect from Mercy and Mayo together developing these treatment pathways.”