Mayo Clinic Launches New Platform for Analyzing Data From mHealth Devices

The Mayo Clinic has launched a new mHealth platform aimed at helping healthcare providers improve their use of connected health devices in remote patient monitoring and other mobile health programs.

The Remote Diagnostic and Management Platform (RDMP) connects devices to AI resources that would help providers with clinical decisions support and diagnoses in what the Minnesota-based health system calls “event-driven medicine.” It’s designed to help providers in and outside the health system analyze and act on data collected by mHealth devices.

"The dramatically increased use of remote patient telemetry devices coupled with the rapidly accelerating development of AI and machine learning algorithms has the potential to revolutionize diagnostic medicine," John Halamka, MD, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, said in a press release issued today. “With RDMP, clinicians will have access to best-in-class algorithms and care protocols and will be able to serve more patients effectively in remote care settings. The platform will also enable patients to take more control of their health and make better decisions based on insights delivered directly to them.”

The news positions the Mayo Clinic as a CDS resource for telehealth and RPM platforms, both of which has seen increased adoption during the coronavirus pandemic. With these programs in place, providers are looking for ways to better aggregate and use the data coming from devices that allow them to track patients remotely.

It also addresses a persistent challenge to mHealth adoption: Reliability. Providers will generally use mHealth devices in patient care if they trust the data coming from those devices and the data is given to them in a way that they can easily use for care management. In developing RDMP, the Mayo Clinic is putting its brand on the platform.

“Today’s announcement is the latest advancement in Mayo Clinic Platform's development of an ecosystem of partners and capabilities that complement Mayo's clinical capabilities and provide access to scalable solutions,” the health system said in the release. “Mayo Clinic Platform is a coordinated portfolio approach to create new platform ventures and leverage emerging technologies, including AI, connected health care devices and natural language processing.”

The Mayo Clinic also unveiled two companies aimed at marketing the RDMP.

The first is Lucem Health, launched by the May Clinic in a partnership with Commure to help providers and mHealth innovators gather and analyze data from any device involved in a remote patient telemetry setting. In this setting, RDMP would be the platform upon which AI algorithms are integrated with data coming from the devices.

The second targets a specific use case for mHealth devices.

Anumana, developed by the Mayo Clinic and digital health company nference, is aimed at the cardiac care space. In this instance, providers would be able to use RDMP to analyze date from mHealth devices used to collect electrocardiogram (ECG) signals.

"Undiagnosed heart disease affects millions of Americans and people across the globe,” Paul Friedman, MD, chair of the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine and the leader of the team that developed the algorithms, said in the release. "For many conditions, such as a weak or thickened heart pump or silent arrhythmias, effective evidence-based treatments exist that can prevent heart failure, stroke, or death. The key is to detect the disease before symptoms develop to prevent these events from happening.”

“The addition of AI to the ECG, a ubiquitous and inexpensive point-of-care test that is already integrated into medical workflows, makes this approach good for patients, convenient for clinicians, and massively scalable," he added.