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This is Laura Dierda
with the Becker's Healthcare
podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by
Steve Bethke,
vice president of solutions develop
a market at Mayo Clinic Platform. Steve, it's
a pleasure to have you on the podcast
today.
Great to be here. Thanks.
Now I'm really looking forward to our discussion
because I know Mayo Clinic Platform just is
on the forefront of so much of what's
happening in the digital health space.
Certainly got a lot happening with data and
artificial intelligence and really working towards making health
care more accessible and, more precise for patients.
But before we dive into our discussion, can
you tell me a little bit more about
yourself and your background?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Early in my career, I spent time in
technology companies, got an MBA,
and then really picked up my head and
said, okay. What I wanna do with my
life and decided health care? So I spent
my career
most of my career in healthcare,
really interesting problems to solve, interesting market and
great and good.
We spend a lot of time doing the
things we do,
so I'm really excited to be in healthcare
where it matters.
I spent some time at the enterprise as
executive
at GE and Optum, but really
the last decade as an operator in private
equity or venture capital backed growth stage companies.
And I joined Mayo Clinic Platform about 3
years ago
and run the solution developer market.
Well, that's great to hear. And, you know,
really, it sounds like a fascinating position to
be in. Based on your role,
at Mayo Clinic Platform, what are some of
the opportunities and headwinds that you have your
eye on right now?
It's a great question.
At the broadest level,
there's really an opportunity to leverage platform thinking
and business models to drive innovation and support
health care providers.
So we've all seen how platforms have really
been changing the world around us. So how
can Mayo Clinic
leverage platform thinking and business models
to improve healthcare,
to drive innovation,
support and enhance the workflow of care teams
and to extend the world class care
that's already provided by Mayo Clinic to patients
around the world.
So that's at a high level. Now
focusing in a bit,
what does that mean? And so really there's
a terrific opportunity to unlock
and expedite innovation for solution developers
so they can drive value and empower
healthcare providers.
So let me sort of step back for
a second. What is a solution developer?
So this could be
a digital health company,
a device company,
a pharma company, really it's anyone building AI
or data centric solutions.
And and maybe I'll take you through an
example of some of the challenges that solution
developers really have.
And and so let's say I'm a solution
developer and I have a really good idea
to support health care providers.
Hey. I wanna teach a computer
how to read an EKG
to recognize low ejection fraction, or
I wanna be able to predict risk of
readmission or risk of colon cancer.
What do I need to do to accomplish
this? So there's a lot of challenges ahead
for me.
The first is
I need data. I need high quality,
comprehensive,
representative
data that's de identified
and can be used to build a solution.
I need compute data science tools in an
environment to do the discovery and development.
And then once I go through all that,
and I built the model, then I need
to validate it. How does it perform?
Sensitivity,
specificity,
bias, and then you see, etcetera.
And and once I've done that, I've taken
a done a ton of work and taken
a huge step forward, but, really, I've just
begun
because now I have to deploy my solution
into workflow,
which we all know is very challenging. And
and I'm not even done yet because now
I have to commercialize and drive adoption.
Right? And obviously, these things are are challenging
and it creates
significant
challenges for the solution developer
moving forward. And so these are really the
challenges
we set out to solve.
A little more detail,
we have 2 programs, Mayo Clinic Platform has
2 programs
that allows us to meet solution developers where
they are in their lifecycle. So first is
Accelerate.
Help tech start ups are really key to
sparking innovation, so we've designed the Accelerate program
to help early stage companies advance their solution
and get ready to go to market. And
then we have Solution Studio Program, which provides
capabilities for the challenges I listed before,
data, tools for development, validation, deployment and adoption.
And these are really for more mature companies,
either
ready to go to market or
possibly already in the market.
So appreciate the time. These are really the
2 programs that we can solve for reuse
to solve for many of the challenges
faced by solution developers
and and are used to unlock
and expedite
innovation.
That's fantastic to hear. And, you know, I
can imagine that many of our listeners appreciate
how much of a challenge it is to
really
stand up programs like that, have the high
quality data that you were talking about,
and really build into the workflows,
everything that needs to be there to successfully,
commercialize the company and then drive the adoption
across the system wide. And, you know, I
can imagine the technology
piece of it is, one challenge, but then,
the people piece of it is another. When
you look at some of the different ways
that you've been able to,
you know, really tackle the challenges, whether it's
on the data side or, you know, really
getting people into that space where, you know,
they're adopting the new technologies or or new
functions,
that need to occur in order to make
sure that your projects are successful. How do
you do that and and really have that
culture of innovation
across the board with Mayo Clinic Platform?
Yeah. That's great.
We we work with and so Mayo Clinic
Platform connects
then the solution developers
to the health care providers.
And we really provide
value in a number of ways. 1, as
we just talked about, the technology, the data,
and capabilities that the solution developer needs, but
then we make the connection to the healthcare
provider.
And so
what we will do is actually go through
a qualification
process
with the solution developer. And you can really
think about this as
transparency,
providing transparency
to the health care provider. And we can
talk more about what this is.
But you can think about it as a
nutrition label
that provides this transparency to the healthcare providers.
And then we also have deploy capabilities
and we mentioned that before. But it's a
common
technology. You can think about it as sort
of endpoint
last mile connectivity into the EMR for those
workloads.
So once
a solution developer is on the Solution Studio
program,
They have the deploy capabilities, which is common
technology
infrastructure
and they have qualification,
which is provides transparency to healthcare providers.
And these things are really important then to
drive adoption determinations?
What is the
the determinations?
What is the performance of the solution?
And
then I can also
connect in with common infrastructure
of Deploy. So these are two really valuable
capabilities
that
we provide
to solution developers that then drive adoption
or ease adoption
into the health
health care provider side of the market.
That's fascinating to hear. And thank you so
much for digging one bit deeper. Now I'm
wondering, how are you thinking about growth and
adding value to the organization all overall? Where
do you see things headed?
Yeah. This is great. So you can think
about Mayo Clinic platform as a 3 sided
marketplace, and I mentioned some of the sides
already solution developer and healthcare provider, but at
the base is data.
So we've created Mayo Clinic Platform Connect,
which is a federated network of the world's
leading medical centers enabling access to globally diverse
eIdentified data. So this is very real. We've
signed partnerships
and are implementing
with 8 of the world's leading health systems
across 3 continents.
We have Mercyhealth
in UC Davis in
the US,
Albert Einstein
in Brazil, University Health Network in Canada,
Chiba Medical Center in Israel, Singh Health in
Singapore, and Seoul National University in Seoul.
So that is the base, you know, one
side
that provides data and that's again hugely important.
The other two sides and we've talked a
little bit about this is the connection
between the solution developers on one side and
the health care providers on the other.
Obviously, healthcare providers are well healthcare providers and
again solution developers are on the other side
are digital health companies, device companies, pharma, anyone
building AI or data centric solutions.
And really, Mayo Clinic platform
continues to grow each side of this marketplace,
connect partners and data, solution developers building innovative
solutions
and health care providers leveraging those solutions. And
then you really see the flywheel
network effect
start to come into play.
Access to broad data drives innovation
with solution developers, which drives value
the health care provider side.
That's great to hear. And, you know, that
firewall can be so important and valuable once
you have it going. But for organizations that
are still at the early stages of developing
a platform like this or or trying to
get their organizations
to,
turn that corner to have that data to
provide access overall,
what's kind of the first step? What do
you need to do, initially
in order to make sure you've got
that data, you've got the right investments in
place to achieve that data and then move
forward from there.
Perfect. Yeah. This is this is really the
generation
of the 2 programs Mayo Clinic Platform,
has created,
right? So we're doing the hard work Mayo
Clinic Platform is doing the hard work
of creating that 3 sided
marketplace. So we're going off and creating
this data asset and the tools and technologies
that solution developers and health care providers need
to create and adopt
innovative solutions. So as a solution developer,
I now have access to 2 programs. If
I'm an early stage solution developer and I
really have a good idea,
maybe I've
had some initial
funding, seed, etcetera,
but I'm really early stage, then I can
get access to Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate.
And that's fundamentally
access to
our product,
Mayo Clinic Platform Discover that allows access to
the compute and data that we talked about.
So these companies can get on early stage
companies can get on, get access to that
data and start creating their MVP.
We also support them with technical, clinical
and administrative resources to
help them think through the problem. So that's
Accelerate and where they can start.
If the solution developer is more mature, hey,
I have a product, I have a solution,
I understand what I want to do, then
you know, those important capabilities and then access
the healthcare provider.
So we've really tried to create programs
inside of Mayo Clinic platform that will meet
the solution developers
where they are in their lifecycle.
That's, you know, really cool to hear and
and definitely seems like a great opportunity to
take advantage of some of the work, like
you mentioned, that Mayo Clinic platform has done
and really incorporate that into something meaningful for
health systems across the country and worldwide.
Now I'm wondering, you know, we talked a
little bit about some of the different things
that are important. Is there any other risks
or investments that you see worth making this
year, especially knowing that for a lot of
hospitals and health systems, they still have tight
margins,
budgets are still, you know, somewhat challenging. So
if they're limited in some of their options,
what do you think is still something that
they need to do or risk they need
to take in order to,
set themselves up for success going forward?
Yeah. And so one one risk or challenge
for them for health care providers is understanding
all the solutions
available
to them.
There there is a cacophony
of solutions and they're bombarded. And as you
said,
they're under a great deal of pressure around
margin,
and they want to provide the best care
they can for their patients. So
how does the health care provider
understand
what these solutions are? Hey, AI is this
incredible
thing that's coming that can support healthcare providers,
enable care teams, etcetera. But as a healthcare
provider,
I'm working on my day to day
and I'm really
battling,
how do I understand
what's real, what's not, what's going to provide
value. And that's and to solve that problem,
that's where,
Mayo Clinic Platform really comes
in inside the solution studio program includes
a qualification
process. So
as we go through,
we evaluate
these solutions so we can provide transparency
to end users.
Again, you can think about this as a
nutrition label
so that the end users then can make
informed decisions.
The qualification
process
includes evaluation from teams of physicians, data scientists
and AI experts.
They look at a number of the criteria,
for example, how
does this solution perform mathematically, what's the evidence
of claims,
etcetera.
And so
given more information and transparency, health care providers
can then make informed decisions,
and adding this layer of transparency
reduces the risk. Again,
health care providers
want to take advantage of all this innovation
that's taking place in the market, but sorting
through and understanding really what's going to
Solution
Studio, we provide them transparency so they can
make better decisions.
Thank you so much for going through that.
I think, you know, it's always so powerful
to have that type of clarity in a
world where you're getting bombarded by so many
different pitches and offers, and there's a lot
of information out there. Things are changing so
rapidly. It seems like a really great benefit
to have that type of clarity in in
cutting through some of the noise. Now before
we wrap up our conversation,
I'm wondering,
would you talk to some of the best
opportunities you see for growth in the future
overall?
What's really some of the things that you
see coming down the pipe that are really
exciting for you?
Yes. So this is really the
power, the
joy of Mayo Clinic Platform model.
The Mayo Clinic Platform builds programs and capabilities
that we offer to solution developers, so they
can drive innovation
that supports healthcare providers.
We empower
and seek to empower all the brilliant innovators
to do just that, innovate,
right? And so, it's actually working. We're seeing
solutions that are broad reaching
from image based cancer detection and
ambient listening to population
health to
administrative tasks like scheduling
and task management.
And so when you really think about this,
solutions
can help
practitioners more quickly identify the most critical patients,
prioritizing them for care.
Solutions can automate or simplify
administrative tasks, reducing burnout,
allowing care teams to focus on decision making
in the human element of care.
They can
treat more patients with the same resources, increasing
capacity,
enabling more time for patient care.
And really simply
they can help providers improve quality and
decrease cost.
So the Mayo Clinic platform and Accelerate and
Solution Studios programs really provide these key capabilities
and connections
that allow solution developers then to unlock innovation
that will benefit
health care providers and, of course,
most importantly, patients.
Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining
us on the podcast today. This has been
such a fun conversation. I learned a lot,
and I look forward to connecting with you
again soon and seeing you at our health
IT digital health at revenue cycle conference in
October.
Look forward to being there.