Mayo Clinic, K Health Collaboration Unveils Hypertension Treatment Algorithm

Digital primary care platform K Health in collaboration with Mayo Clinic Platform, Mayo Clinic’s portfolio of digital healthcare initiatives, launched a personalized hypertension treatment algorithm designed to provide real-time clinical decision support and improve treatment plans.

Hypertension is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as higher-than-normal blood pressure. Hypertension puts an individual at higher risk for other conditions such as heart attack and stroke, the leading causes of death in the US. Forty-seven percent of adults in the US reportedly have hypertension, and in 2019, more than half a million US deaths had the condition listed as a primary or contributing cause.

Treatments for hypertension can be complex, often involving a combination of medications and lifestyle changes. Because hypertension is impacted by many factors, finding an optimal treatment plan for a patient can be challenging.

Mayo Clinic Platform and K Health are attempting to address these challenges through a newly built predictive analytics platform, which utilizes real-time, de-identified patient data to generate personalized hypertension treatment recommendations. All primary care physicians using K Health’s digital care platform will be able to use the model.

The collaboration utilizes Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover, one of the platform’s de-identified patient datasets, to generate these insights. The dataset comprises structured and unstructured data from 10 million patients across clinical specialties, including 1.2 billion lab test results, 3 million echocardiograms, and more than 640 million clinical notes. The dataset also contains information related to diagnoses, pathology and radiology reports, and medications.

“Powered by the knowledge and analytical tools provided by Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover, K Health is deriving key insights and demonstrating the power of technology to improve and accelerate better, more personalized care for as many people as possible,” said Steven Bethke, vice president for product portfolio at Mayo Clinic Platform, in the press release. “Starting with hypertension, K Health’s clinical and data science teams will unlock innovation using Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover to create a novel way to reduce the time between the diagnosis and treatment.”

Others are also partnering with Mayo Clinic Platform and using its offerings to fuel healthcare innovation.

Earlier this month, Mayo Clinic Platform partnered with medical technology company Becton, Dickinson, and Company (BD) to utilize de-identified patient data to perform detailed post-market analyses on BD’s medical device offerings with the aim of forecasting unmet patient needs and improving future products.

Under the partnership, BD analysts will look at data from Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover to understand patient care pathways, experiences, and needs better. This data includes information outside of what is usually gathered for clinical trials, which some experts believe may add value when examining if and how medical devices meet patient needs.