Mayo Clinic Platform Strikes Partnership to Analyze Medical Device Use

Mayo Clinic Platform, Mayo Clinic’s portfolio of digital healthcare initiatives, has partnered with medical technology company Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) to utilize de-identified patient data to perform detailed post-market analysis on BD’s medical device offerings, with the goal of fueling healthcare innovation and forecasting unmet patient needs.

The partnership will utilize Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover, one of the platform’s de-identified patient datasets, for analysis. The dataset is comprised of 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.

Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover is designed to give artificial intelligence (AI) developers access to large amounts of healthcare data to help them build algorithms. Data is continuously refreshed and added as patients travel across the care continuum to make the dataset more robust over time. All data is de-identified, and the platform uses a multi-layer, re-identification defense strategy to protect patient privacy.

BD analysts will take this data, which provides information outside of what is typically gathered in medical device clinical trials, and examine it to better understand patients’ care pathways, experiences, and needs. Randomized control clinical trials are generally considered the gold standard when evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical devices, but some experts are seeing added value in utilizing real-world data to measure if and how these devices are meeting patient needs, according to the press release.

By examining their products, BD hopes to address unmet patient needs, forecast device use, and generate evidence more effectively to create better products that improve patient outcomes. The company also hopes to use Mayo Clinic Platform data to support new claims for its products and streamline device-regulatory submissions going forward.

"Our next generation analytical tools and curated de-identified patient data create a dynamic, privacy-protected environment for discovery that few in the industry can provide," said Steven Bethke, vice president for product portfolio at Mayo Clinic Platform, in the press release. "Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover enables medical technology leaders such as BD to derive key insights as they develop solutions for their customers and patients as quickly and safely as possible."

As part of its goal to improve patients’ lives by enabling new knowledge and technologies, the Mayo Clinic Platform offers three tools aside from Mayo Clinic Platform Discover: Mayo Clinic Platform_Gather, Mayo Clinic Platform_Validate, and Mayo Clinic Platform_Deliver.

Gather accepts healthcare data from various sources and aggregates and integrates it to reduce interoperability issues that limit data usability. Validate identifies and reduces bias in AI models by measuring each model’s sensitivity, specificity, and potential for bias. Deliver uses data from multiple sources and sends insights it generates from these data directly to point-of-care to support clinical decision-making.