Mayo Clinic on Wednesday announced the launch of a new platform that's designed to deliver advanced, AI-powered clinical decision support through remote monitoring. It helps providers stay connected and deliver more continuous care to device-connected patients.

WHY IT MATTERS
The health system's new Remote Diagnostics and Management Platform was created to deliver what it calls "event-driven medicine," connecting patient data with machine learning algorithms within existing clinical workflows and enabling care in the "right context, at the right time."

"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," said Mayo Clinic Platform president Dr. John Halamka in a statement.

"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," he added. "The platform will also enable patients to take more control of their health and make better decisions based on insights delivered directly to them."

To help the new platform capitalize on its potential, Mayo Clinic worked with vendor partners to launch two new spinoff companies, each focused on a specific aspect of that AI-powered connected health.

Anumana, created in collaboration with biomedical-data company nference, is focused on commercialization of AI-enabled algorithms and bringing digital sensor diagnostics to market. Its first goal is to improve early detection and treatment of heart disease by designing new neural-network algorithms based on troves of heart health data in Mayo's Clinical Data Analytics Platform, including raw ECG signals.

Lucem Health, meanwhile, is designed to "collect, orchestrate and curate data from any device," according to Mayo Clinic. Launched with doctor-focused developer startup Commure, Lucem will provide the overall platform for connecting remote-telemetry devices with the algorithms developed by Anumana and Mayo, and will be responsible for integrating those AI-powered diagnostic insights into clinical workflows.

Anumana completed $25.7 million in Series A financing, led by founders nference and Mayo Clinic, along with Matrix Capital Management, Matrix Partners and NTTVC, as part of this initiative. Lucem Health completed $6 million in Series A, led by Mayo and Commure.

"When technology and policy and culture align, you see radical change and innovation," said Halamka during a teleconference announcing the RDMP launch. "Think for a moment what we've seen over this last year of COVID-19. We see that all of us are carrying these super-computing devices. Many of us have wearable devices. In fact, our homes may be smart and have sensors.

"So here's the interesting quandary," he said. "If you, as a primary care provider or specialist, want to work with a patient, if you were the payer or pharma or government and you want to ensure the health and wellbeing of a population, how do you take all this new data that is coming from the devices we have, and wear, and are in our homes around us, and turn it into wisdom? How do you respond to events rapidly? How do you filter the signal from the noise?

"What's happening in 2021 is we are seeing the emergence of sophisticated AI algorithms that can, in combination with novel data sources, result in breakthroughs in disease detection and wellness," he added. "But that will require an assembly of technology, policy and patient engagement, combined with cultural change in order to make it happen."

THE LARGER TREND
"Undiagnosed heart disease affects millions of Americans, and people across the globe," said Dr. Paul Friedman, chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Mayo Clinic.

"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."

ON THE RECORD
"ECGs have been read and notated manually by physicians for more than a century," said Murali Aravamudan, cofounder and CEO of nference and CEO of Anumana, in a statement. "Our augmented intelligence technology, in the hands of scientific and clinical experts, will enable a comprehensive translation of the language of the heart. We think of it as the Rosetta Stone for cardiac medicine."

"Lucem Health exists to help diagnostic medicine innovations see the light of day," said Sean Cassidy, founding CEO of Lucem Health. "We are excited to work with partners like Mayo Clinic and Anumana that are reimagining how we detect and treat diseases."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
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