Mayo Clinic launches digital health product pipeline

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Dive Brief:

• Academic medical giant Mayo Clinic has created a new program meant to speed the development and deployment of digital health products in hospitals.
• Mayo launched the program, called Solutions Studio, on Tuesday during the annual HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida. Solutions Studio is an initiative of Mayo Clinic Platform, Mayo’s portfolio of products and services mostly geared around data insights and technology adoption.
• The program is meant to alleviate the cost and difficulty digital health companies face when selling to hospitals, while making it easier for hospitals to find and integrate useful tools, according to a release.

Dive Insight:

Digital health companies face a number of challenges in selling to hospitals, including a lengthy sales cycle and implementation process. That’s not to mention development costs, which can reach millions of dollars depending on the complexity of the model. Meanwhile, hospitals engulfed in point solutions are increasingly looking for tools that can address a wider array of pain points, especially as they continue to navigate operational pressures like inflation and elevated labor costs.

Mayo’s goal is to serve as a pipeline for proven technologies to reach hospital buyers, according to the company. It’s also a source of new revenue for the system. Digital health companies will have to pay a qualification fee, Steve Bethke, Mayo Clinic Platform’s vice president of product portfolio, told Healthcare Dive over email.

That fee is “followed by shared value for solutions that are implemented,” Bethke said.

Mayo did not share specifics of the financial arrangement by time of publication.

In return, Solutions Studio gives participating companies access to a pool of de-identified, standardized data to test and train their models against, along with a library of analytic and training tools. Companies can have Mayo inspect their model’s performance and can have their solution be “qualified” after a review by Mayo doctors and data scientists.

Mayo will also help companies weave their tools into electronic health records, according to the release.

Perhaps most importantly, participating digital health vendors will receive standardized contracting processes, marketing opportunities and access to more than 45 hospitals affiliated with Mayo.

Mayo launched Mayo Clinic Platform in 2019. The initiative serves as a marketplace for developers looking to build solutions around health data. Twenty-eight companies used the platform last year, and by the end of 2024, Mayo expects “up to five of the world’s top hospitals” will be contributing data, according to the company.

It offers products like Validate, which tests AI for bias, specificity and sensitivity.

Mayo has been active in implementing new technology. Last summer, the Rochester, Minnesota-based system inked a partnership agreement with Google to explore utilization of generative artificial intelligence in its hospitals.