On the heels of a leadership shakeup at Mercy that left Mercy Springfield Communities president Craig McCoy out of a job, Mercy has announced an agreement with the Mayo Clinic.
The healthcare system claims the 10-year collaboration is a first-of-its-kind alliance between two large healthcare systems.
What the collaboration means
Mercy and the Mayo Clinic were both early adopters of electronic health records, according to a news release. The two healthcare systems will use aggregated clinical deidentified data to generate patterns to pinpoint disease earlier and identify best treatment options.
Until recently, the information in the electronic health records was too unstructured and complex to analyze, the statement said.
Mercy and the Mayo Clinic believe their “different populations and geographic locations will improve accuracy, reduce model bias and create more diverse, and therefore stronger, treatment recommendations for patients.”
Dr. John Mohart, president of Mercy communities, said in the news release they have a unique opportunity “to transform mountains of clinical experience into actionable information that optimizes patient care.”
The Mayo and Mercy alliance will focus initially on patient outcomes.
The healthcare systems said all data are deidentified and secured in a distributed data network that allows them to work with an extensive set of outcomes without extracting or transferring data between the two organizations. Each healthcare system will retain control over its deidentified outcomes throughout the process, they said.
Mercy’s president and CEO Steve Mackin said they hope to work together in other patient-focused areas as well, including precision medicine, transplant care, complex cancer, cardiovascular, neuroscience and more.
