Late last year, the Mayo Clinic and Google inked a partnership that may prove to be a primary harbinger of what the future confluence of healthcare and technology will look like. The alliance, set to last decades, focuses on
developing healthcare applications for advanced cloud computing and AI-powered analytics. The goal is purposefully open to interpretation: develop innovations in the delivery of care.
Digital Transformation Will Bring The Future of Healthcare into Focus
At least from the get-go, Mayo Clinic hopes to advance virtual care with AI-enabled digital diagnostics, leverage cloud technology to help clinicians conduct medical research, and deploy new AI algorithms to boost the efficacy of precision treatments and clinical outcomes across the board.
To drive the project, Mayo Clinic will store patient data in Google Cloud, which will provide input into customized and experimental cloud and machine learning tools designed to help researchers solve a variety of healthcare challenges. Mayo will maintain control and access to patient records, utilizing long-standing HIPAA-compliant controls, and authorize access to patient records as needed, case-by-case.
“Data-driven medical innovation is growing exponentially, and our partnership with Google will help us lead the digital transformation in health care,” said Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., president and CEO of Mayo Clinic. “It will empower us to solve some of the most complex medical problems; better anticipate the needs of people we serve; and meet them when, where and how they need us.”
The Benefits of Digital Transformation Technology in Healthcare
Data, cloud, analytics, and various methods of high-octane number crunching offer a number of benefits to healthcare organizations…and in the years ahead, these foundational capabilities and tools will be used to identify and refine opportunities for next-generation medical technologies and methodologies.
Here are a few ways digital transformation technologies can affect change in the delivery of healthcare:
- Decrease medical errors…Through deep analysis of patient records and flagging inconsistencies in a patient’s health and drug prescriptions, care providers are empowered to prevent a multitude of complications.
- Reduce emergency room visits…Up to 28 percent of ER visits are recurring patients also called “frequent flyers” that often utilize ERs for primary care uses. Analytics can be used to identify these people and create preventive plans to decrease the frequency of their visits.
- Estimate future admission rates…Facilities can staff more efficiently, which saves money and reduces emergency room wait times.
So, we expect to see exciting innovations in these areas. The Mayo/Google alliance certainly won’t be the only tech/healthcare partnership looking to solve the biggest healthcare challenges. We’ll be watching with great interest as more and more research projects attempt to figure it out, we’ll continue to bring you more analysis on the digital transformation of healthcare. We’ll also parlay those understandings into the solutions Imaging Office Systems provides its healthcare clients.