Mayo Clinic Announces Partnership, Clinical Decision Support EHR Integration

Mayo Clinic has announced a strategic two-year collaboration with health IT vendor Verily to develop a clinical decision support EHR integration.

The collaboration will leverage the health IT vendor’s advanced clinical analytics applications to create a point-of-care resource for clinical decision support.

Mayo said the EHR integration is set to provide clinicians with contextualized and validated knowledge on disease management, care guidelines, and treatment options to help aid in clinical decision making.

The vendor will develop the decision support tool using a broad range of health-relevant data sources, including deidentified health record data and Mayo Clinic’s multidisciplinary and multispecialty clinical content.

Through a user-centered design approach, the vendor, Verily, aims to create an EHR integration that seamlessly delivers actionable care insights to clinicians within their native workflows.  

Initially, the collaboration will focus on a set of cardiovascular and cardiometabolic conditions, some of the most common and costly chronic conditions affecting Americans.

"The exponential growth in medical discovery and knowledge has reached the point where it is almost impossible for caregivers to keep up with the latest advances,” Bradley Leibovich, MD, medical director of Mayo Clinic's Center for Digital Health, noted in a public statement.

“This tool will make Mayo Clinic's deep expertise available to care teams so that they can have concise, relevant and applicable answers to clinical questions, tailored to specific needs of each patient," Leibovich continued. "We hope it can be used as a GPS for patient care."

The health IT tool will leverage open standards to allow integration with multiple commercial EHR systems.

The clinical decision support EHR integration will first be deployed at Mayo Clinic with the opportunity to extend the health IT to the vendor’s partners and customers.

"Mayo Clinic is leading the way in health care informatics and quality of care," said Vivian Lee, MD, president of Verily Health Platforms. "We have a unique opportunity to combine Mayo's leadership in knowledge management and clinical informatics with Verily's data science and product development expertise to create curated and validated clinical care pathways for clinicians.”

As the digital health transformation progresses, stakeholders are leveraging health IT to streamline clinician workflows and cut down on EHR administrative burden.

Ajay Dharod, MD, vice chair of informatics and analytics for the Department of Internal Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Health, co-created a clinical decision support app to mitigate clinician burnout.

Dharod created the WHIRL app in 2017 alongside former colleague Mark Frankel, MD. The application automatically pulls together pertinent clinical information for providers for clinical decision support, eliminating the need to manually click through the EHR.

“The amount of data required to make a good clinical decision on an individual patient is enormous, and we should be individualizing our decisions for patients as clinicians,” Dharod noted in a July interview with EHRIntelligence.

This system is discreet, Dharod noted, with messages appearing on the side of a physician’s screen rather than stopping physicians in their tracks.

“There are simply suggestions that float in to get you thinking about costs and options, and then float away to let the clinicians do what they do best, which is care for patients, with that nudge of decision support,” Dharod explained.  

Dharod said that time spent using the EHR has gone down and clinician EHR satisfaction has gone up at Wake Forest directly due to the implementation of the software. He added that there has not been an increase in reported adverse events, as well.