Mayo Clinic Platform expands with Israel's Sheba, 3 other hospitals

Israel’s largest hospital – Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer – will benefit from novel opportunities and approaches provided by the Mayo Clinic including earlier and more-accurate diagnoses, personalized care and hospital-level care at home, thanks to its Mayo Clinic Platform.

This service offers dedication to patient-centered care, treatment of rare and complex cases, exceptional outcomes and world-class research, said Sheba. Innovative data science will enable scalable and accessible personalized, predictive and proactive medicine for patients.

The Mayo Clinic is expanding its distributed data network known as Mayo Clinic Platform Connect to include Sheba, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein (Brazil) and the University Health Network in Canada, joining Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, which was Connect’s first member.

The first-of-its-kind global alliance establishes a data-sharing network that transcends language barriers and accelerates artificial intelligence-based solutions by using current data science and years of clinical data to create better patient outcomes around the world.

It provides secure, cloud-based access to clinical data across three continents, making it possible for each organization to work with an extensive set of de-identified information about patients and their conditions without moving it among the organizations. Each healthcare system keeps control over its de-identified data throughout the process.

“We describe the data needed for fair, equitable AI as having depth (types of information), breadth (number of patients) and spread (heterogeneity). To transform health care globally, we must expand our distributed data networks to every continent. We must protect privacy, adhere to international laws and regulations, and incorporate knowledge from every language. Today, three premier medical centers in South America, Canada and the Middle East are joining our network. They will inspire and guide other regions and systems to join our worldwide effort,” said the Platform’s president, John Halamka.

Overcoming the diversity of languages

UNTIL RECENTLY, complex types of medical information such as integrated electronic health records data, radiology and pathology images, as well as videos, were too unstructured and complex to analyze. The diversity of languages presented a significant barrier to consolidating clinical data on a global scale.

With the combination of privacy-protected, cloud-based storage and the growth of AI and machine learning, the Mayo Clinic Platform and the members of Connect will use aggregated, de-identified clinical data to generate patterns to pinpoint disease earlier and identify the best treatment options.

“We are thrilled to be part of this historic alliance to transform the future of health. Creating a truly global network that will break down language barriers and enable the inclusion of diverse populations, we are unlocking the potential of AI solutions to revolutionize health care worldwide. This is not just a game-changer, but a visionary leap toward data-driven health care,” said Prof. Eyal Zimlichman, the chief transformation officer and chief innovation officer at Sheba and director and founder of the hospital’s ARC (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate) Innovation.

The alliance will initially focus on patient outcomes through:

1. Information collaboration – secure cloud-based use of “Data Behind Glass.” This allows each collaborator to base decisions on a wider range of clinical outcomes gathered over time. The information, the Mayo Clinic said, will help scientists analyze patterns of effective disease treatment and, more importantly, disease prevention in new ways, based on reviews of incremental clinical patient data over time.
2. Solution and algorithm development, validation and deployment – The resulting AI-based solutions will provide proven treatment paths based on years of patient outcomes, representing the next generation of proactive and predictive medicine that can be used by care providers around the world.

“Mayo Clinic is transforming health care, but we are not doing this work alone,” Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., president and CEO of Mayo Clinic revealed. “We created Mayo Clinic Platform Connect to enable innovative organizations to join us to partner to create a healthier, more equitable future for everybody.”

This is the second major agreement that Sheba has signed with the Mayo Clinic during the past year. In 2022, Mayo Clinic and Sheba Medical inked an agreement that will make it easier to share health technology and support early-stage start-up companies. This collaboration is creating an environment that enables rapid product development in the US and Israeli markets, allowing technologies to be established and launched to transform healthcare delivery for all.

“Sheba transcends borders to provide innovative care,” added Sheba director-general Prof. Yitshak Kreiss. “The Sheba and Mayo Clinic partnership will have a significant global impact on personalized medicine.”