AI holds incredible promise for the future of medicine, but it takes more than just algorithms to make that promise a reality.

— Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

"AI holds incredible promise for the future of medicine, but it takes more than just algorithms to make that promise a reality,” says Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. “It requires a commitment to innovation and to the talented individuals who can turn theory into practice. By creating the Gerstner Scholars Program at Mayo Clinic, we ensure that clinicians with patient-first strategies have what they need to redefine what’s possible in healthcare."

The inaugural cohort of 10 Gerstner Scholars has already demonstrated exceptional promise, presenting high-impact projects poised to significantly advance healthcare. Their innovative proposals highlight the transformative potential of AI in medicine.

Learn more about Gerstner Philanthropies.

FIRST COHORT OF GERSTNER SCHOLARS 

Alina M. Allen, M.D. | Rochester, Minnesota
Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Project: Intelligent and Automated Clinical Care Pathway for Diagnosis and Referral of Patients with Liver Disease and Fibrosis 

Dr. Allen will develop and implement an automated clinical care pathway that integrates machine learning models to diagnose metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), also known as fatty liver disease, which affects 1 in 3 adults and is one of the most common causes of liver transplantation. This fully automated care pathway will identify patients at risk of MASLD, stage the severity of liver fibrosis/scarring, and trigger appropriate diagnostic imaging and hepatology referrals.

Carrie M. Carr, M.D. | Rochester, Minnesota
Department of Radiology

Project: GRACIE: Glioma Review Using AI, Clinical Notes, Imaging and Other Electronic Documents

Dr. Carr will use a large language model (LLM) to succinctly abstract data from the electronic health record to present a radiologist with a clear timeline that contains prior radiologic results, radiochemotherapy regimens, surgical procedures and pathology data for patients with primary brain tumors. By having a clear timeline leading up to the current study, radiologists will be better equipped to render higher-quality, more timely interpretation of a patient’s MRI that can be used in clinical care.

Chia-Chun Chiang, M.D. | Rochester, Minnesota
Department of Neurology 

Project: Precision Migraine Treatment: An AI-Powered Approach for Migraine Prevention

Dr. Chiang will construct and implement machine learning models that can accurately predict treatment response to commonly used migraine preventive medications based on clinical phenotypes and electronic health record data elements. Based on promising pilot studies, she will expand variables, validate models and translate models into the clinical practice.

Lauren A. Dalvin, M.D. | Rochester, Minnesota
Department of Ophthalmology 

Project: AI-Assisted Screening for Choroidal Melanoma

Choroidal melanoma is the most common adult intraocular cancer, which is fatal in up to 50% of patients. Dr. Dalvin will leverage Mayo Clinic’s robust database within the ocular oncology service to develop machine learning models that detect and triage high- and low-risk choroidal lesions to improve patient survival rates by early cancer detection.

Christopher A. Dinh, M.D. | Rochester, Minnesota
Division of Hospital Internal Medicine

Project: Implementing Predictive AI Models to Improve Hospital Patient Flow

Dr. Dinh will implement three predictive AI models into the clinical practice to improve hospital patient flow and discharge efficiency. Early identification of hospitalized patients with complex discharge needs can help focus case management resources earlier on in the hospital stay and thereby reduce hospital length of stay. An efficient hospital discharge will also improve the experience for patients and their families.

Antonio J. Forte, M.D., Ph.D. | Jacksonville, Florida
Department of Surgery

Project: Development of a RAG-LLM in Virtual Assistant for Post-Operative Surgical Care

Dr. Forte will enhance an AI virtual assistant with a retrieval augmented generation (RAG)-based LLM to provide more accurate, personalized and adaptable postoperative care support to patients and improve patient outcomes and safety.

William D. Freeman, M.D. | Jacksonville, Florida
Department of Neurosurgery 

Project: SAHVAI: Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Volumetric Artificial Intelligence

SAHVAI is an AI tool for measuring the amount of blood leaked into the spaces and folds of the brain in patients with life-threatening aneurysmal bleeding, reducing time to intervention and improving risk stratification for serious events. “Time is brain,” and SAHVAI has demonstrated significant promise in initial studies for acute stroke care. Dr. Freeman will advance this tool and enhance SAHVAI readiness for wider implementation.

Scott A. Helgeson, M.D. | Jacksonville, Florida
Division of Allergy and Pulmonary Medicine 

Project: AI Based Non-Invasive Detection of Blood Pressure Using Photoplethysmogram (PPG)

Dr. Helgeson will develop a cuffless, non-invasive AI model to accurately predict blood pressure across all ranges — from hypotension to hypertension — using PPG signals, trained with arterial line blood pressure measurements for enhanced precision and comfort in patient care.

Abhinav Khanna, M.D. | Rochester, Minnesota
Department of Urology

Project: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Personalize Early Detection and Monitoring of Kidney Cancer

A large percentage of patients with kidney cancer present with advanced stages of disease, including a subset of patients with incurable metastatic kidney cancer. Early detection is paramount to facilitate early intervention and to alter disease trajectory. Dr. Khanna will apply a novel AI algorithm to facilitate early detection of kidney tumors and personalize tumor surveillance strategies based on deep learning analysis of tumor radiomic features.

Irbaz B. Riaz, M.B.B.S., Ph.D. | Phoenix, Arizona
Division of Hematology and Oncology 

Project: Precise and Intelligent Outreach for Therapeutics and Clinical Trial Yield (PRIORITY)

Using AI, Dr. Riaz will implement an LLM-enabled chatbot to proactively inform patients of relevant new Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trials and treatments, improving access and engagement beyond clinical visits and increasing accrual to clinical trials through targeted outreach.

The post Gerstner Scholars Program in AI Translation appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Seeing the Unseen

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the deadliest forms of the disease, with the American Cancer Society reporting a five-year survival rate of 13% in its 2024 statistics. It’s one of the lowest survival rates of any cancer, due in large part to the challenge of identifying pancreatic cancer early. But Mayo Clinic clinician-investigators have always believed it was possible to identify pancreatic cancer at a stage before symptoms become present — significantly boosting the odds of survival.

Time after time, early screening risk programs failed to make meaningful inroads. Individual review of patient imaging files is challenging — the human eye isn’t proficient at making the diagnosis that early, causing false-positive rates to soar.

But Mayo Clinic had a differentiator. It was a deep, longitudinal dataset dating back decades that included people who had been diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. The depth of the data meant that researchers could look back even earlier in patient records to review imaging taken 12 months or more prior to the discovery of cancer.

“The data allowed our teams to train an artificial intelligence (AI) model on that patient cohort that could pick up those early-stage pancreatic cancer cases with really high sensitivity and specificity,” says Matthew Callstrom, M.D., Ph.D., who serves as medical director of the Strategy Department and medical director of Mayo Clinic’s Generative Artificial Intelligence Program. “It could do this at a very high accuracy — 97%.”

Our aspirations for AI are to impact patient outcomes.

— MATTHEW CALLSTROM, M.D., PH.D.

Dr. Callstrom says the work of Ajit Goenka, M.D.; Panos Korfiatis, Ph.D.; and Eric Williamson, M.D., and their teams showed that Mayo Clinic could determine whether a person had pancreatic cancer through applied AI at an early point in disease progression. Currently in the U.S., lung cancer causes the most cancer deaths, followed by colorectal cancer and then pancreatic cancer.

“We think we can shift the needle on that,” Dr. Callstrom says.

While discovery in medicine is challenging, translating those discoveries into clinical practice can be even more complex, according to Dr. Callstrom. This year, Mayo Clinic research scientists including Aadel Chadhuri, M.D., Ph.D.; Suresh Chari, M.D. (emeritus); Dr. Goenka; and Mark Truty, M.D., M.S., are testing the pancreatic cancer algorithm in the AI-PACED clinical trial, an area where Mayo Clinic excels. By focusing on patients at high risk for pancreatic cancer, particularly those with a family history of the disease, Mayo Clinic can evaluate new AI-driven approaches with more impact.

Mayo Clinic embeds scientists directly in clinical practice where they work alongside clinicians who understand the problems patients face and have access to the data. Together, they develop and test AI solutions in real time.

“That’s across the entire organization, and there are incredible discoveries being made all over,” he says.

FROM THERE TO HERE

Like many clinicians at Mayo Clinic, Dr. Callstrom’s background is varied and unique. He was a chemical engineering major at the University of Minnesota who stayed to do a Ph.D. in chemistry, followed by a postdoctoral opportunity at Harvard University.

From there, he began teaching chemistry at The Ohio State University. When one of his friends who was also a colleague at Ohio State was diagnosed with colon cancer, the experience deeply affected him.

“I became very motivated to try to impact patients’ lives. I went into medical school and was very fortunate to get into Mayo Medical School (now called Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine),” Dr. Callstrom says. “I’ve done all my training here, and my clinical emphasis is on treating patients with cancer.

“So, I do interventional oncology treating patients and trying to help them through a very difficult period in their life. And through the other aspects of my work in AI, we are hopefully developing cures for them.”

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In fact, Mayo Clinic has been looking at AI approaches for more than a decade, and its emergence in imaging over the most recent years dovetailed with Dr. Callstrom’s interests in figuring out how he could help the lives of as many patients as possible.

“He’s a pioneer in AI, working on machine learning back when most people weren’t thinking about that,” says Jim Rogers, CEO, Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology. “His singular focus has always been: ‘What can I do to improve care for folks?’

“There’s real courage and vision there. Because of him and others throughout the institution, Mayo now has more machine learning AI algorithms in actual practice — not just theory — than any other organization.”

ALREADY ACTIVE

Results from that early work are popping up all over Mayo Clinic, which has more than 60 AI models already deployed behind the scenes every day. This means that the solutions have been built and validated and are running automatically.

One area ripe for innovation is in cardiovascular medicine. Itzhak Zachi Attia, Ph.D.; Paul Friedman, M.D.; Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, M.D., M.S.; and Peter Noseworthy, M.D., M.B.A., among a team of many others, are using EKG data to train various models to look for issues. Already one algorithm has been found to be effective in accurately identifying atrial fibrillation (AFib) at an early stage. Using a similar approach to the clinical trial in pancreatic cancer, the team discovered that AFib could be detected more than six months before it becomes clinically important.

“The reason that’s impactful is that once atrial fibrillation starts, clots can form in the heart, and those clots can travel to the brain and cause a stroke,” Dr. Callstrom says. “So, if you can stop that or prevent it from happening, you avoid a debilitating outcome for a patient and get them on medication early.”

Another model can diagnose patients with low ejection fraction, a form of heart failure, before symptoms are present, allowing doctors to intervene before the issue becomes critical.

“That model runs on every Mayo patient who has an EKG now,” Dr. Callstrom says. “Our cardiovascular medicine team ran a clinical trial in our health system with 20,000 patients to find out that this did have an impact on patient outcomes. We were able to measure it, and it picked up many patients with unsuspected heart failure or AFib. It was pretty amazing.”

EXPANDING THE FOUNDATION

Jim Rogers, who also serves as the senior administrator for the Generative AI Program, emphasizes that Mayo Clinic’s AI approaches align with the organization’s Bold. Forward. strategy to enhance internal care delivery while pursuing broader healthcare transformation.

The work is purposefully iterative. While each project is initially focused on a specific application or disease, Mayo’s established structure allows new learnings to be expanded to other areas by encompassing disciplines like genomics, pathology, imaging, text analysis, voice recognition and more.

The goal? Practical integration of all these elements to benefit physicians’ abilities to solve the needs of patients.

“We’re learning from every activity and with each step forward,” Jim says. “We’re not doing this out of mere curiosity — we want practical impact as quickly as possible. When a patient walks into one of our rooms, they expect us to have all the information needed to effectively treat them.”

CONNECTED CLINICIANS

AI’s impact isn’t just limited to disease identification and treatment. It’s helping physicians connect on a deeper level with patients too.

Mayo Clinic is using AI-powered ambient listening technology to transform patient encounters. Instead of clinicians typing notes during conversations — which can detract from personal interaction — the AI system captures and summarizes the discussion automatically. Then, the clinician can rapidly review and approve the notes, ensuring accuracy in the patient’s record.

We’re not doing this out of mere curiosity — we want practical impact as quickly as possible.

— JIM ROGERS, CEO, MAYO CLINIC DIGITAL PATHOLOGY

Dr. Callstrom says this innovation eliminates a difficult choice many physicians face: either document during the visit or spend extra time recording notes later in the day, hours after the appointment. With ambient AI handling documentation in the background, providers can focus entirely on patient interaction, ultimately bringing more humanity into healthcare.

A PROMISE-FILLED FUTURE

Even with all the advances, it’s what’s on the horizon that excites Dr. Callstrom the most.

Mayo Clinic is leveraging AI to analyze complex data in unprecedented ways — from genomics and digital pathology to cellular-level imaging. It’s all part of the organization’s mission in this new era to ensure the needs of the patient come first.

“Our aspirations for AI are to profoundly impact patient outcomes,” Dr. Callstrom says. “One of the things we always talk about is trying to identify disease at a state where we can intervene early. Previously, it’s been hypothetical — ‘If we had the right data, we could do this.’ It turns out with AI we can.”

The post Seeing the Unseen appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

It wasn’t the needle itself that brought Erika joy, but where the injection was occurring. Erika received treatment in 2024 in her Jacksonville, Florida, home as part of Mayo Clinic’s Cancer Care Beyond Walls program. Launched in April 2023, the program offers patients in the Jacksonville area access to care in their homes instead of the chemotherapy unit at Mayo Clinic in Florida.

“Most people would think a long injection isn’t very fun, but before, my treatment was taking a full day when you added in driving and everything else,” Erika says. “Now it’s five minutes. When it’s over, everything gets cleaned up and my nurse leaves. It’s wonderful.”

Families with Cancer Care Beyond Walls no longer must surrender entire days to in-person chemotherapy. Instead, treatment becomes integrated into their daily lives.

Erika was one of 55 Florida patients who had received infusions in their home through March 2025, a number that has continued to grow.

“Bringing cancer care straight to the patient’s home is a big step toward helping make cancer care more accessible,” says Morgan Posze, R.N., a nurse with the program. “It’s empowering for the patients and the families to not have to go through the stress that comes with having to change your whole life to be able to come to the clinic.”

Cancer frequently functions like a chronic condition, explains Roxana Dronca, M.D., who heads the program. When patients are in chemotherapy, there are regular hospital visits — and with those visits, lots of waiting. Studies have shown that after receiving a cancer diagnosis, patients can spend up to 15 hours a week traveling to receive treatment and sitting in waiting rooms.

“This program was born from Mayo Clinic’s primary value — the needs of the patient come first,” Dr. Dronca says. “It was hard to meet all our patients’ needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially patients with cancer. Mayo Clinic made care more accessible and flexible during the pandemic, but after the pandemic the needs of patients with cancer were still there.”

Erika Manternach (in black) and Kim Pineda are just two of the patients who are participating in the Cancer Care Beyond Walls program.

FREEDOM TO LIVE MORE NORMALLY

Kim Pineda has been a regular at Mayo Clinic in Florida since being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016.

She’s endured radiation, as well as challenging courses of chemotherapy — “the kind where I thought I might die, and not from the cancer.”

She went to a supportive stage for nearly a year. Then her cancer returned — this time it was in lymph nodes all along the left side of her body. That required another surgery, and from that point forward, since 2018, she’s been going to Mayo Clinic in Florida for treatment every three weeks.

That’s thousands of hours spent driving, walking from a parking spot through the clinic, and sitting and waiting. For Kim and her husband, Charlie, chemotherapy sessions kept them away for long stretches from the diner they own.

“The biggest challenge with cancer is time,” Kim says. “When you’re getting treated, your meds don’t get ordered until you’re sitting in the chair. For an hour-and-a-half infusion, you’re looking at four hours in the clinic. Even for a five-minute shot, the quickest I was ever in and out was 45 minutes.”

In 2024, in the middle of another long treatment day, Kim asked if there was any way to speed things up.

Her doctor told her there was something she might consider: Cancer Care Beyond Walls. Kim was an ideal candidate because she wasn’t experiencing any issues with her chemotherapy.

The care she received in her Jacksonville home was the same as in the clinic but took up a fraction of the time. Getting chemotherapy and working at the diner became a lot easier.

“I absolutely love it,” Kim says. “I have my little space in the closet where I store all my stuff. That’s my doctor’s office. I pull it out for them in the morning before they come.”

In addition to providing chemotherapy, Cancer Care Beyond Walls has integrated clinical trials for some patients, including Erika.

Erika had previously experienced a bad reaction to immunotherapy. Her Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center care team switched her to subcutaneous injections, rather than in a vein, believing the longer absorption period would be easier on her system.

Cancer Care Beyond Walls patients have access to Mayo Clinic care at all times.

This provided an avenue for me to take less time off work and spend more time with my family and doing the things I enjoy.

— ERIKA MANTERNACH

For example, when patients wake up in the middle of the night with a fever — which for those with cancer is a potential crisis that requires a trip to the hospital — a provider is only a push of a button away.

That button is on a tablet that Mayo Clinic provides to every Cancer Care Beyond Walls patient. When the button is pushed, a nurse in the Mayo Clinic in Florida control room appears on screen.

“We’ve worked so hard on this program’s safety and quality standards so that when we were ready to deliver it to our patients, it was a Mayo Clinic level of care,” Dr. Dronca says. “I believe that’s why our patients reacted positively to us, because they did not feel like it’s care that is detached from Mayo Clinic’s standard of excellence.”

Open image in lightbox

Open image in lightbox

A MOTHER’S MISSION

The origins of the Cancer Care Beyond Walls began with a heartbreaking loss.

In 2020, Dr. Dronca’s 6-year-old daughter Maya was diagnosed with an inoperable and incurable brain tumor known as a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). DIPGs are an extremely rare and aggressive form of brain cancer that primarily affects children and carries a median survival time of nine months.

Maya bravely fought her cancer for 14 months. She passed away in 2021.

“It was so difficult to put her in the car and transport her when she was so sick,” Dr. Dronca recalled. “The drive was a ton more painful than any drug. For any procedure that she went to, I would have given anything to have the flexibility and the availability of those services in my home.”

After losing her daughter, Dr. Dronca was overwhelmed with grief. She wasn’t sure she could return to her roles as the chair of the Division of Hematology and Oncology and the site director of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Florida. She feared she would see the face of the daughter she lost in every patient.

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She ultimately came back, possessing the compassion of someone who fully understood the pain families go through while fighting cancer. Treating patients with cancer was, and remains, Dr. Dronca’s life mission.

Dr. Dronca resolved that patients should be able to receive convenient, safe care in their homes whenever possible, sparing them the painful drives her family endured when Maya was sick.

“If I had access to the medications to give Maya and the labs to check her health status, I would have done this for her in my home,” Dr. Dronca says. “I kept thinking about it. If I wanted it, wouldn’t other people want it? Other mothers and caregivers and patients must feel like me.”

Jeremy Jones, M.D., is a consultant in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and the medical director of Cancer Care Beyond Walls for Mayo Clinic Platform. He has been involved with the program from the beginning. He says that it didn’t take long to appreciate just how big a difference receiving chemotherapy at home made for patients.

“I knew we were on to something when my first patient was finishing up their six months in the program,” Dr. Jones says. “When I said, ‘OK, we’re going to come back to the clinic now,’ they were like, ‘Absolutely not!’ It’s the first time I’ve ever had a patient express enthusiasm for continuing their current chemo regimen — because it was in their home.”

START TO FINISH: CHEMOTHERAPY AT HOME

Erika works as a quality assurance analyst for a trucking logistics company from her home. The Cancer Care Beyond Walls program afforded her a level of flexibility that was impossible to have with traditional care in the clinic. “The infusions are the same at home and in the clinic, but the buildup to actually receiving the treatment takes a long time,” Erika says. “They’re doing your blood work, waiting for the results of your blood work, meeting with the oncologist to clear you. “Then they place the order for the meds. Then you wait for the meds. Then they come in and they prep you.” Now, a typical treatment day for Erika might look like this:

DAY 1

8:30 a.m.

A Cancer Care Beyond Walls nurse calls to discuss how Erika is feeling. This usually lasts just a few minutes.

9:00 a.m.

A visiting nurse comes to Erika’s house to draw blood and measure vitals. This usually lasts about 30 minutes.

12:45 p.m.

In a video call with her Cancer Care Beyond Walls oncology team, they go over the results of her blood work and get the go-ahead for treatment. This usually lasts a few minutes.

DAY 2

9:30 a.m.

The refrigerated chemotherapy medications are delivered to her house by a courier.

10:00 a.m.

The visiting nurse arrives. While the medications are unpacked so they rise to room temperature, the nurse and Erika videoconference with the Cancer Care Beyond Walls team.

10:30 a.m.

Erika receives her treatment. Afterward, there is a second videoconference with the Cancer Care Beyond Walls team. Following that, the nurse cleans up and leaves. The courier returns to the house to remove all medical-related waste.

THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS

When Dr. Jones learned of Dr. Dronca’s vision for Cancer Care Beyond Walls, he says he shared her excitement for the idea. He also knew that it would not be easy to build.

“There were a lot of sleepless nights as we were developing Cancer Care Beyond Walls,” Dr. Jones says. “Tons of work went into what we have now — months of planning and thinking about every potential outcome, every potential event that could happen so that we could plan for it.”

Designing and running such an ambitious program required partnerships across the enterprise. None was more important than Mayo Clinic Platform.

“The partnership of Platform really accelerated our efforts,” Dr. Dronca says. “To set up a program like this, between us talking about it and doing the proof of concept was a few months. If you look at how healthcare moves anywhere, it would have taken two or three years to set up. But we had Platform’s support, their innovative thinking and their speed.”

To help bring the ideas to life, Platform needed a cancer care clinical operations expert. They found it in Rosanna Fahy.

At that time, Rosanna was with Memorial Sloan Kettering, where over the course of 31 years she had played a leading role in building and expanding their brick-and-mortar cancer care facilities.

For Rosanna, the opportunity to build the digital side of Cancer Care Beyond Walls — and to work with Platform leaders like John Halamka, M.D., M.S., Dwight and Dian Diercks President of Mayo Clinic Platform, and Maneesh Goyal, Platform chief operating officer — was as daunting as it was exciting. After a thorough interview process, she was offered the position of Platform’s associate vice president for Cancer Care Beyond Walls.

“Cancer is a complex disease,” Rosanna says. “For patients who are in the chemotherapy unit today, it probably takes seven or eight people in different roles who each have to do their piece in a connected way so that patients get safe, high-quality, dependable treatment.

“Now we do it so often that it looks pretty easy. But when you’re sitting in the chemotherapy chair, you’re not realizing how many things had to happen before that moment.”

Some of the key pieces were already available, Rosanna says. Mayo Clinic’s efforts to provide more remote care during the COVID-19 pandemic and the infrastructure of Advanced Care at Home were both valuable.

Since 2020, Advanced Care at Home has provided acute-level, inpatient-quality care to patients whose conditions included infections, congestive heart failure, bone marrow transplants, kidney transplants and other postsurgical needs.

Cancer Care Beyond Walls uses the same tablets and collection of technologies as Advanced Care at Home, making it possible to connect patients to a 24/7 command center.

During business hours on weekdays, when a Cancer Care Beyond Walls patient wants to speak with someone, they can push a button on their tablet and be connected to one of Mayo Clinic’s three dedicated Cancer Care Beyond Walls nurses.

On weekends, patients are connected with an Advanced Care at Home nurse. An oncology provider is on call at all times.

“My interactions with the patients are always either going to be video calls or phone calls,” says Morgan Posze, a nurse in the program. “It’s my job to create a space where the patient feels comfortable sharing their concerns and asking questions.

“I try to focus on listening to not only their medical needs but also their emotional experiences. We’re here to address anything and everything that they need.”

In addition to the foundation provided by Advanced Care at Home, Morgan represents an example of another key resource Cancer Care Beyond Walls already had in place: an exceptional clinical care staff that was committed to better meeting patients’ needs. Morgan, who had been with Mayo Clinic for almost a decade, jumped at the chance to be a part of Cancer Care Beyond Walls.

Her role is to be patients’ central point of contact with Mayo Clinic. Nurses connect patients with their entire care team, working closely with providers and schedulers to help coordinate everything from appointments to tests to medications — making sure everything lines up for each patient and their specific needs.

“The command center has a lot of the equipment that we need to make this virtual care possible,” Morgan says. “It’s really nice for us because the whole Cancer Care Beyond Walls team sits together, so it’s easy to collaborate to come up with plans and make changes. We all sit in one group where we can work together to make sure the patient is getting the best care.”

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Open image in lightbox

CREATING MORE POSSIBILITIES

In 2024, Cancer Care Beyond Walls’ impact was also felt by those Florida patients who needed to come into the Cancer Center for care.

“We are able to reach more patients because we can treat patients at phases of lower acuity in their home,” Dr. Dronca says. “This allows us to see the patients with complex conditions in the chemotherapy unit and the hospital when we need to see them.”

As Cancer Care Beyond Walls grows, one of the many beneficiaries will be patients who live in remote and underserved communities — an important step toward addressing health disparities. Benefactor support is accelerating the program’s growth by enhancing digital tools, developing community partnerships, and recruiting patient navigators and clinical staff to expand the program.

“Mayo Clinic has invested in building a digital product that would enable Cancer Care Beyond Walls’ care delivery model to be expanded, not only at Mayo Clinic but also to our Mayo Clinic Care Network partners,” Rosanna says. “Platform is building digital solutions that help our own practice, and we could ultimately take these same solutions and make them commercially available.”

Mayo Clinic is working to make at-home cancer care widely available. These efforts received a significant boost in 2024 with a generous philanthropic commitment from Stephen M. and Barbara J. Slaggie. In addition to other locations, the Slaggies are helping expand Cancer Care Beyond Walls to Mayo Clinic partners.

“We were excited when we learned about Mayo Clinic’s vision for making world-class cancer care available in more patients’ homes,” says Stephen Slaggie, who is a cancer survivor himself. “Not having to regularly upend your life every time you receive treatment makes it less overwhelming when you are facing cancer.”

‘THE PERFECT FIT’

For Erika Manternach, 2024 was also the year that Mayo Clinic doctors discovered she had a lymph node that was almost entirely encased with metastatic melanoma. She had initially been diagnosed with cancer in 2021 but had been put on a surveillance program of PET scans, MRIs and skin checks because the cancer seemed stable.

Tons of work went into what we have now — months of planning and thinking about every potential outcome, every potential event that could happen so that we could plan for it.

— JEREMY JONES, M.D.

After Erika underwent lymphadenectomy surgery to remove several cancer-containing lymph nodes and others at high risk, she was recommended to participate in Cancer Care Beyond Walls. Erika’s first two chemotherapy sessions were at Mayo Clinic in Florida before she began the first of 12 at-home sessions, per the structure of the program. To reduce the risk of infusion reactions in the home, all patients must have at least two cycles in the clinic prior to switching to at-home care.

“I can’t speak highly enough about this program,” Erika says. “This provided an avenue for me to take less time off work and spend more time with my family and doing the things I enjoy. It was the perfect fit.”

The post Healing at Home appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Imagine if you could create a digital clone of yourself that can be used to test various treatment options to determine which one is best for your real self. As strange as this may sound, it’s no longer in the realm of science fiction.

What Are Digital Twins?

According to consulting firm McKinsey & Co, “digital twin is a digital replica of a physical object, person, system or process, contextualized in a digital version of its environment. Digital twins can help many kinds of organizations simulate real situations and their outcomes, ultimately allowing them to make better decisions.”

In the inanimate world, that could include a computer model of an airplane that can be used to test out new design concepts or safety features, or a digital twin that simulates the functioning of a piece of machinery that needs an update. It's likely about $73.5 billion will be spent on this technology by 2027, including product, data and system twins.

How Are Digital Twins Used?

A recent study from Scientific Reports illustrates how the technology can be used in a medical setting. Indian investigators enrolled over 1,800 patients with type 2 diabetes and created a digital twin (DT) for each patient that simulated their metabolic status, dietary intake, blood glucose levels and lifestyle habits, enabling the twin to predict a patient’s outcomes.

Shamanna et al explained: “The DT system continuously collects and analyzes data from various sensors and inputs, allowing it to offer personalized dietary and lifestyle recommendations that are precisely calibrated to minimize PPGRs [postprandial glucose response] and improve overall glycemic control. The DT platform will suggest the right food to the right participant at the right time based on current readings. The behavioral nudges provided by the digital twin were accompanied by human coaching.”

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This kind of individualized advice goes way beyond what is offered to patients with diabetes, who typically receive recommendations based on static guidelines and the results of the blood glucose.

The study results suggest digital twin technology works. At one-year follow-up, patients on the program saw significant improvement in hemoglobin A1c levels, with a drop of 1.8%, and 89% achieved a drop to less than 7%, a goal that diabetes experts recommend. They also required significantly less antidiabetes medication and experienced better weight reduction and less insulin resistance.

Similarly, researchers from Yale School of Medicine, University of Oxford and elsewhere have shown that digital twin technology has the potential to transform cardiovascular medicine. Thangaraj et al explain that these cardiac replicas can “enhance disease phenotyping, enrich diagnostic workflows, and optimize procedural planning. Digital twin technology is rapidly evolving in the setting of newly available data modalities and advances in generative artificial intelligence, enabling dynamic and comprehensive simulations unique to an individual. These twins fuse physiologic, environmental and healthcare data into machine learning and generative models to build real-time patient predictions that can model interactions with the clinical environment to accelerate personalized patient care.”

In simple English, the healthcare data they refer to integrates various diagnostic procedures — e.g., ECGs, cardiac imaging and vital signs — with several other multimodal sources, including content from an individual patient’s electronic health record, their lifestyle decisions, and their exposure to climate change, medications, environmental toxins and so on. These resources enable clinicians to make predictions about what is likely to happen to the real patient being profiled. Studies suggest, for instance, that digital twins may help cardiologists estimate an individual’s risk of ventricular arrhythmias if they already have ischemic cardiomyopathy by using certain anatomical substrates, triggers and modulators.

Digital Twins in Action

Phyllis M. Thangaraj, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiology fellow at Yale School of Medicine, and her colleagues provide an example of how the technology might work.

Ms. K, 76 years old, has heart failure, preserved ejection fraction, type 2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension. Her electronic health record offers additional data, including an enlarged left atrium, and a note recommending her diuretic be paused because hydrochlorothiazide has lowered her potassium level and increased uric acid.

Her digital twin model is created based on all her data and runs a simulation of different blood pressure and diuretic drugs, comparing it to other patients with similar profiles. The twin also takes into account the latest guidelines and randomized controlled trials, finally recommending the patient be put back on hydrochlorothiazide and several other medications.

While this scenario is not yet within reach of most healthcare providers, it has the potential to profoundly transform patient care.

This article was originally published on Mayo Clinic Platform.

The post Digital Twin Technology Has Potential to Redefine Care appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

From restoring organs that would otherwise not be safe for transplantation to advancing a bioengineering research strategy to grow humanlike organs, these innovations are changing the practice of transplant medicine. 

Safely Transplanting More Organs

Mayo Clinic experts consider organ perfusion systems — mechanical devices that enable donated lungs, hearts, kidneys and livers to remain viable for longer — one of the biggest technological advances in transplantation. As an early adopter of this technology, Mayo Clinic surgeons are restoring organs that would otherwise not be safe for transplantation, meaning more patients have access to lifesaving organ transplants. 

“Organ perfusion technology has helped us expand the donor pool and deliver transplants to more patients, all while maintaining some of the best patient outcomes,” says Bashar A. Aqel, M.D., director of the Arizona Transplant Center.

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Helping Transplants Last Longer

Mayo Clinic research teams are leading efforts to decrease the rate of graft failure or organ transplant rejections. Researchers are determining whether chimeric antigen receptor-T cell therapy (CAR-T cell therapy) could be used to control the body's immune response and prevent organ rejection.

CAR-T therapy has mainly been used to treat blood cancers. Applying this technology to transplants would be a new experimental use of CAR-T therapy. The research team expects to begin first-in-human clinical trials in early 2025.

“Some transplant patients have antibodies in their bloodstreams that increase their chances of organ rejection. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to find a proper match,” says C. Burcin Taner, M.D., chair of the Department of Transplantation at Mayo Clinic in Florida. “We hope research will show whether CAR-T cell therapy could harness the immune system to suppress antibodies that are causing rejection.” 

Using AI to Identify Organ Failure Earlier

Research leaders are applying AI to detect organ failure earlier and to better manage post-transplant immunosuppression. They are in the early stages of using AI to help determine how a patient’s body will react to immunosuppression medications and guide when the medications should be adjusted. This work may eventually make post-transplant care easier for patients, eliminating the need for routine biopsies and blood draws.

Teams are also leveraging AI to predict the ability of certain medications and devices to prevent kidney failure and pulmonary hypertension. In addition, experts are determining AI’s ability to detect potential effects of early interventions to delay or prevent organ failure and need for organ replacement therapies.

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Bioengineering New Organs

Experts hope that one day there will be a way to engineer new organs using regenerative medicine. Mayo Clinic is advancing a bioengineering research strategy that brings together 3D bioprinting, tissue engineering, biomaterials and cellular materials to grow humanlike organs.

Mayo Clinic is also partnering with external organizations to develop bioengineering capabilities that will benefit patients worldwide. “Bioengineering new organs is promising, but complex. We're looking at a research timeline of 5 to 10 years to potentially bring this new option to patients,” says Dr. Taner. 

The post The Next Frontier of Transplant Medicine appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Whether excelling as an elite athlete or dealing with an unexpected medical condition, she has met each new chapter head-on.

Her determination extends to every aspect of her life, including her tireless work for Mayo Clinic Platform. In this role, she is part of a team tackling the transformation of healthcare to benefit patients around the world.

A Natural-Born Athlete

Dr. Turkowski grew up in Richmond, Minnesota, with two athletic brothers and a dad who was a coach, so sports were a natural fit.

She wanted to play hockey in high school even though there were no female players on the team. Undaunted, she became the first. She continued to excel in multiple sports and received an athletic scholarship to St. Cloud State University for volleyball.

Despite being an experienced athlete, in 2008 Dr. Turkowski suddenly began having trouble completing routine workouts. She sought help from several doctors.

No one had answers.

“One day I was walking on a treadmill, and I didn’t feel right,” Dr. Turkowski remembers. “It was like having tunnel vision. My ears were buzzing. My heart went nuts, and I had to get help.”

The next thing Dr. Turkowski remembers is waking up in an ambulance. Her care team ran tests at the hospital, but she went home without answers. She spent the next several weeks worrying and waiting before deciding to go to Mayo Clinic.

From Elite Athlete to Heart Failure

At Mayo Clinic, Dr. Turkowski was diagnosed with stage 2 heart failure and ventricular tachycardia, a type of irregular heartbeat caused by scarring on her heart. She would later learn this was likely a result of myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle, usually triggered by a viral infection.

As a seasoned team athlete, Dr. Turkowski immediately recognized how teamwork drove her care at Mayo Clinic.

“My care team told me, ‘Let’s do this together. It might be a long journey, but we’re not going to give up on you,’” she recalls. “The experience was in line with everything that I knew would create success. They brought me in as part of the team. That’s huge.”

Determined to have the highest quality of life possible, Dr. Turkowski began treatment with medications and procedures to disrupt the tissue causing the arrythmia. Then life threw her another curve ball. During her second procedure, Dr. Turkowski went into cardiac arrest on the table.

“I didn’t have a pulse,” Dr. Turkowski says. “They had to give me CPR to get my heart started again. After that, my doctor told me it was time to live a recreational life instead of being a competitive athlete. It was time to find something else to fill my cup.”

Charting a New Course

Dr. Turkowski’s diagnosis forced her to rethink the way she pushes herself physically. But it also motivated her to reevaluate her professional goals, and she credits her patient experience at Mayo Clinic and the organization’s unique approach to collaboration as the inspiration.

Dr. Turkowski left her job as an accountant to pursue her doctorate from Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. After graduation, she spent five years at Mayo Clinic researching genetic heart conditions. During her time in Cardiovascular Medicine, she used artificial intelligence (AI) models to study how data can provide insights into medical conditions.

Then, Dr. Turkowski had an opportunity in 2020 to meet John D. Halamka, M.D., M.S., the Dwight and Dian Diercks President, Mayo Clinic Platform, and Michael D. Brennan, M.D., President's Strategic Initiative Professor.

“I knew with my business skills in the accounting world and my science background as a researcher this would be the perfect fit,” she recalls. “I knew I could make a difference here.”

Dr. Turkowski joined Mayo Clinic Platform as a postdoctoral researcher, becoming one of the first eight members. Today, the team has grown to more than 150 with Dr. Turkowski serving as director of Services and Solutions Development.

“I have a personal calling to Mayo Clinic Platform,” says Dr. Turkowski. “My role is to translate solutions so patients can start down a better path sooner. We have to start before the problem happens. That’s how we are going to change healthcare.”

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Building the Ecosystem

Dr. Turkowski describes Mayo Clinic Platform as an ecosystem, noting that it is not about Mayo Clinic alone but the entire world. It’s a community of data, collective challenges and scalable solutions.

Mayo Clinic Platform teams carefully research and review provider markets, listening to the challenges of physicians and other healthcare providers. Once these needs are identified, Dr. Turkowski and her colleagues turn to the data to determine how AI can be used to optimize clinical workflow and improve patient care.

“The data is what makes Mayo Clinic Platform so powerful,” says Dr. Turkowski. “We are developing our data network with partners from all over the world. And when organizations join, they are bringing their data to this ecosystem. It is the foundation to finding solutions for patients.”

As of November 2024, Mayo Clinic Platform’s distributed data network includes de-identified information from more than 38 million patients from healthcare organizations spanning four continents. These member organizations maintain control of their data, and innovators query it using a privacy-protected process. All data must be structured consistently and stripped of any identifiable information.

For example, one of the projects Dr. Turkowski is currently working on is a practice transformation effort with Mayo Clinic’s gastroenterology team. Videos of endoscopies, minimally invasive procedures to examine the digestive system, are valuable to this group, yet the capability to include videos within the Platform’s dataset does not currently exist. Dr. Turkowski and her team are collaborating with the gastroenterology team to develop a way to make this possible.

“I love being connected to the clinical practice on a daily basis,” she says. “I get to work with amazing innovators at Mayo Clinic and witness their passion for healthcare. Their love for caring for their patients is amazing.”

In the Right Place

Dr. Turkowski says she’s grateful to be part of a team that shares her determination to succeed.

“When I was a patient, I saw how Mayo approached care,” says Dr. Turkowski. “True success comes from a solid, dedicated team. I saw it in my research, in my education and in Mayo Clinic Platform. We work together as a team. We are driven. We have a mission, and we have the grit and commitment to transform healthcare in a way that was previously unimaginable.”

Today, years after she lost consciousness on a treadmill, Dr. Turkowski is moving forward at full speed toward a better future in healthcare. “I’m fortunate to be part of this team. And I’m fortunate to be alive. There were times I didn’t know if I was going to wake up,” she says. “I’m sitting here today because Mayo saved my life, and I get to work on something really special. I’m in the right place.”

The post From Heart Challenge to Healthcare Innovation appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Physicians and researchers across Mayo Clinic are developing and using AI-driven tools that accelerate new knowledge, solutions and technologies. Mayo Clinic is also partnering with other leading institutions worldwide to better leverage resources and advance responsible, effective and trustworthy AI practices.

Discover how AI is making an impact on patient care at Mayo Clinic.

Revealing Seizure Hot Spots to Accelerate Life-Changing Care

Drug-resistant epilepsy often requires surgery to remove seizure-causing brain tissue.

First, though, patients must typically undergo a different surgery to implant electrodes in their brain, followed by weeks of monitoring neural activity to identify where the seizures are located.

It’s challenging for physicians to accurately detect high-frequency brain waves because of their short duration and low amplitude, as well as environmental noise. Physicians currently use a labor-intensive manual data analysis process to remove unwanted or corrupted data points.

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed new AI tools to more rapidly and accurately pinpoint seizure hot spots in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. Nuri Ince, Ph.D., a consultant in the Mayo Clinic Department of Neurologic Surgery, is the senior author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications Medicine.

Enhancing the identification process means patients can more quickly undergo targeted tissue removal surgery, which is critical for achieving seizure freedom. Faster identification also reduces the need for prolonged monitoring after electrode implantation, minimizing risks like infection — which is five times more likely to occur in children than in adults during prolonged stays in epilepsy monitoring units.

The group's future work will focus on transforming the framework into a fully digital, real-time system that can interpret the brain waves during electrode implantation surgery and provide feedback to the clinical team regarding the location of the epileptic brain tissue.

To learn more, visit Mayo Clinic News Network.

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Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology Opens New Frontiers in Medicine

In early 2025, Mayo Clinic launched Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology, a platform that will accelerate diagnostic speed and accuracy, leading to faster, more personalized treatments and cures.

This new platform involves collaborations with NVIDIA, a world leader in accelerated computing, and Aignostics, an industry leader in building AI models for digital solutions.

Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology takes advantage of unique Mayo Clinic assets:

• Mayo Clinic Platform, which unites data resources, solution developers and novel deployment methods to drive digital innovation.
• Mayo Clinic Laboratories, a global leader in diagnostics that provides advanced testing and pathology services for healthcare organizations worldwide.

Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology uses large, diverse datasets to build powerful artificial intelligence models in pathology, which addresses a major challenge in the field: the widespread use of analog processes. This hinders access to critical diagnostic data that could be used to expand diagnostics and treatments and speed the development of new therapies to benefit patients.

The early results of this collaborative, multidisciplinary effort are promising. As of mid-January 2025, Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology has leveraged 20 million digital slide images linked to 10 million patient records that incorporate treatments, medications, imaging, clinical notes, genomic data and more.

To learn more, visit Mayo Clinic News Network.

Providing Clinicians With the Most Useful Medication Alerts

Two Mayo Clinic Ph.D. candidates, Caroline Grant and Jean Marrero-Polanco, are exploring how AI can provide clinicians with predictive alerts about their patients’ potential response to specific medications in a study published in the journal Clinical and Translational Science.

Grant and Marrero-Polanco, under the mentorship of senior study author Arjun Athreya, Ph.D., a computer scientist in the Mayo Clinic Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, surveyed 305 clinicians across Mayo Clinic sites in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota, as well as Mayo Clinic Health System, about their communication preferences.

The researchers used AI to process large volumes of survey data and uncover insights that are hard to detect with traditional methods. They found that clinicians generally prefer concise, individualized alerts that use patient-specific genomic data to help personalize their care, rather than more generic or detailed alerts. Concise, individualized alerts are more actionable and less intrusive for clinicians.

The next phase of this research will involve testing these refined alerts in actual clinical settings to determine their effect on clinician burnout and patient outcomes.

To learn more, visit Mayo Clinic News Network.

The post 3 Ways AI Is Improving the Patient Experience at Mayo Clinic appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

It’s a vision that is close to the couple’s heart, as both have witnessed friends and family pass away from the disease.

“I’ve seen the time, the energy and the emotions that the entire family goes through watching their loved one undergo cancer treatment for months or even years,” says Becky, whose father passed away from melanoma when she was 13 years old. “If we catch the cancer earlier when the treatment isn’t so challenging, it would be life-changing for so many families.”

To help fuel this critical work, Bahman and Becky established the Hoveida Family Foundation Cancer Discovery and Interception Fund through a generous gift from the Hoveida Family Foundation. Becky and Bahman are recognized as Philanthropic Partners.

The fund is helping accelerate Mayo Clinic’s bold vision to revolutionize cancer care. Researchers are using innovative, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled science to detect cancer earlier, intercept and reverse cancer growth, and intervene before cancer progresses to more advanced disease.

The concept of using AI to find solutions to challenges is a process that Bahman understands well. An engineer and businessman, he co-founded a software company, Open Systems International, in Minnesota in 1992. As the company grew, Bahman and Becky never wavered from their commitment to environmental stewardship, ethical sourcing and treating their employees like members of their own family. After selling the company in 2020, the couple formed their family foundation so that they could “keep doing good.”

The Hoveida Family Foundation is focused on the pursuit of science to help humanity and the environment. This includes critical medical research, and Bahman says that Mayo Clinic was at the top of their list. Bahman, who was born in Iran, recalls hearing of the medical organization as a child.

“I knew that the royal family was seen at Mayo Clinic and that it was the great center of medical care in the world, but I didn’t really know much else at the time,” Bahman says.

That all changed in 1999, when Bahman’s father was diagnosed with colon cancer and selected Mayo Clinic for his care.

“The care he got was excellent,” says Bahman. “I was very impressed with the systems in place, and that’s when I realized what a high-quality institution Mayo Clinic was. Healthcare is moving to a high-tech, data-driven industry, and Mayo is pioneering this work.”

Both Bahman and Becky are patients in the Mayo Clinic Executive Health Program, trusting Mayo Clinic with their personal care as they stay connected with the promising research efforts that they’ve helped make possible — including AI-powered breast cancer detection and early pancreatic cancer detection.

Within breast cancer research, a Mayo Clinic researcher and a researcher from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have used funds to develop and test a model that better identifies women who are at high risk and would benefit from preventive measures like lifestyle changes and risk-reducing medications. Next steps will be to validate the model. 

In pancreatic cancer research, a physician researcher and his team have designed an AI Pancreas Cancer Early Detection trial, which is expected to launch later this year. The trial will leverage an AI language model to screen 10,000 patients, identifying those at elevated risk for pancreatic cancer.

“The work in pancreatic and breast cancer is so meaningful to us,” explains Becky. “Just before we gave our gift, we had lost a valued employee and friend to pancreatic cancer. The time from diagnosis to death was so short. I had also recently lost a family member to breast cancer. The idea of using science to diagnose these cancers at an earlier stage is incredibly important.”

The Hoveida Family Foundation Cancer Discovery and Interception Fund is also supporting AI-Powered Science and Discovery Awards in Cancer. This program finds and funds the most innovative concepts and proposals from individuals and teams across Mayo Clinic.

“Mayo Clinic has created a great team of researchers, data scientists and AI experts,” says Bahman. “They have a level of passion that I have not seen anywhere else. If a practical solution comes out of this research to detect cancer even six months ahead of when cancer symptoms manifest, that’s a huge advancement in saving thousands of lives. I have great hopes that Mayo Clinic will be successful.”

Becky agrees, adding that she feels pride in being part of Mayo Clinic’s mission to help people everywhere.

“When Mayo Clinic finds solutions, their goal is to disseminate information across the medical field worldwide and make it available to everyone,” says Becky. “They are helping more than their own patients — they are helping the world."

The post Engineering Earlier Cancer Detection Through AI appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Making Cancer Care at Home More Available

Cancer Care Beyond Walls has made life a lot easier for patients with cancer and their families.

However, insurance companies do not typically reimburse for at-home chemotherapy infusion, which means that Mayo Clinic is currently underwriting Cancer Care Beyond Walls’ costs.

Mayo Clinic actively engages in federal advocacy work and payer discussions, explains Rosanna Fahy, Platform’s associate vice president for Cancer Care Beyond Walls.

“Sending a nurse to individual patients’ homes is more expensive than having a nurse in a chemo unit who could treat three or four patients at a time,” Fahy says. “I’m grateful for the institutional funding that has supported the program while the data is gathered to meet the reimbursement challenges.”

Rosanna says it’s not surprising that chemotherapy at patients’ homes, when viewed in isolation, is less cost-efficient than at a single clinical location. It simply costs more to have so many moving pieces — nurses, cars, couriers, chemotherapy solutions — than it is to centralize all operations in a single chemo unit.

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But Mayo Clinic is gathering the data to show a fuller financial picture, which may influence future insurance decisions for at-home chemotherapy. Rosanna says that reimbursement models are not just about the cost of care today — they’re about the cost of each patient’s care over the course of their cancer journey, and how the nature of that care influences outcomes.

“We can predict how many times a patient with cancer is likely to have an emergency department visit for some kind of acute care need,” Rosanna explains. “That's knowable and predictable.

“So, if we can intervene early by managing your care at home and avoid that ED visit, that's where the savings start to come — acute care and emergency episodes are higher cost. Savings are not only about direct costs; they’re also in patients’ time and their comfort at home.” 

Collecting data to demonstrate the economic benefits of at-home chemotherapy is just one way Mayo Clinic is working to grow the concept. Other efforts are making a more immediate impact on patients with cancer during their treatment journey.

In 2025, Cancer Care Beyond Walls began in North Dakota, when Altru Health System became the first partner in the Mayo Clinic Care Network to launch the program. Rosanna worked in 2024 to make this expansion possible, alongside Jeremy Jones, M.D., a consultant in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and the medical director of Cancer Care Beyond Walls for Mayo Clinic Platform. Rosanna and Dr. Jones worked closely with Altru, using Platform resources to develop a pragmatic clinical trial.

They both note that there’s a certain symmetry to this. Altru was the first partner to ever join the Mayo Clinic Care Network, Mayo’s community-based rural healthcare delivery system, and now it’s the first organization in the Care Network to join Mayo Clinic in transforming how cancer care is delivered to patients.

“The Platform model is really an enablement model,” Dr. Jones says. “It's less about, ‘Mayo Clinic has to own every single step of the way,’ and more of, ‘Let's show the world how to do things the Mayo Clinic way.’ The beautiful thing about Platform is that we can reach so many more people.”

The post Making Cancer Care at Home More Available appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Oliver is remembered for his infectious smile and the love and resilience he radiated to all who knew him, even from the intensive care unit. Born with a rare and incurable genetic epilepsy disorder, he inspired a pioneering program designed to expedite genomic-related diagnoses and enhance definitive patient care. 

"Oliver's life was a brief gift, but he left a mark deeper than his time with us," says his mother, Justine Bates, sitting in the comforting glow of purple lights in honor of her baby boy. Those lights, adorning the windows and a memory tree in her Minnesota home, symbolize epilepsy awareness. Close to her heart, Justine has a tattoo of Oliver's small handprint. 

Oliver's father, Casey Bates, will always remember the quiet evenings spent holding his son after work. He proudly displays his own tattoo that reads "Seize the day," a subtle nod to his son's seizure condition and a reminder to cherish every day. 

"He loved to laugh, and he had the best facial expressions. He was my snuggle bug," Casey says. 

Oliver’s Diagnostic Journey 

Oliver's health journey began when he was just 5 weeks old, when his first seizure led his parents to rush him to a local emergency room. 

The complexity of his case and the initial hospital's difficulty in diagnosing him led them to transfer Oliver to Mayo Clinic for specialized care. At Mayo, Oliver underwent a comprehensive series of tests, including exome sequencing, which specifically examines 20,000 protein-coding genes where many diseases originate. Although this sequencing technique can provide crucial insights into rare conditions, it can require time for detailed analysis and interpretation of the results. 

While Oliver's initial tests did not reveal the cause of his ongoing seizures, the exome sequencing — which took nearly a month to process — finally helped his care team diagnose Oliver's condition: a rare form of epilepsy known as WWOX-related epileptic encephalopathy (WOREE syndrome). Although the diagnosis helped his care team guide Oliver's care, the condition currently has no cure. He passed away on March 10, 2022, surrounded by his loved ones.

A New Era in Genomics 

Rare diseases affect 300 million people worldwide, yet only about 25% of patients ever receive a diagnosis, and often that diagnosis has no available treatments. 

Recent advancements in genomic technologies are beginning to offer a glimmer of hope. Clinicians are using these cutting-edge tools, which leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to scour volumes of data, transform diagnostics, and make it possible to identify and understand rare diseases more quickly and accurately than ever before. This is opening avenues for the development of more treatments. 

Inspiring Genomic Advances 

Witnessing firsthand the critical need for such advancements, Whitney Thompson, M.D., a key member of Oliver's care team, felt compelled to act, moved by Oliver's family's wait for a diagnosis. With support from the Department of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine and the Center for Individualized Medicine, she launched an ultra-rapid whole genome sequencing program in Mayo Clinic's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). 

In this pioneering program, which is a collaboration with Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine in San Diego, California, clinicians use new sophisticated technology and AI to sequence a patient's 3 billion DNA base pairs in approximately 48 hours. This comprehensive analysis can identify even the most subtle genetic variants, though it may not always lead to a diagnosis. 

"Rapid diagnoses can lead to lifesaving treatments in some cases, and while not every rare disease has a treatment, every diagnosis brings crucial information that can guide medical decisions and help families anticipate what’s next," says Dr. Thompson, who is completing her fellowship training in neonatal medicine, clinical genomics and bioethics as part of the Clinician Investigator Training Program at Mayo Clinic. 

Oliver's life was a brief gift, but he left a mark deeper than his time with us.

— Justine Bates

Under this program, through the Mayo Clinic Department of Clinical Genomics with Brendan Lanpher, M.D., as practice chair, infants and children admitted to Mayo Clinic's Eugenio Litta Children's Hospital in Minnesota undergo ultra-rapid whole genome sequencing if they meet specific criteria. 

The program, launched at Mayo Clinic in June 2022, has since been expanded to some adults who exhibit symptoms suggestive of genetic disease, enabling them to receive the same rapid, comprehensive DNA analysis. To date, more than 300 infants, children and adults have been offered whole genome sequencing. 

Dr. Lanpher hopes the program will open the door to more patients having access to comprehensive genetic testing. 

"This is the future of medicine," Dr. Lanpher says. "I believe there are many patients with unrecognized or undiagnosed genetic diseases, and by finding and testing these patients early in the course of symptoms, we'll have the best chance at making a difference, finding a treatment and avoiding a diagnostic odyssey." 

Introducing BabyFORce 

Achieving a precision diagnosis is just the first step of a broader goal. Dr. Thompson and her team also have their sights set on rapid individualized therapeutics. She is collaborating with Laura Lambert, Ph.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Functional Omics Resource (FORce), along with Eric Klee, Ph.D., the Everett J. and Jane M. Hauck Midwest Associate Director of Research and Innovation at the Center for Individualized Medicine, and Filippo Pinto e Vairo, M.D., Ph.D., director of the center's Program for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases. 

Together, they have initiated a first-of-its-kind program called BabyFORce, which uses AI to help clinicians identify individualized therapeutics for some of the smallest and sickest patients with genetic diseases in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. 

"We’re tapping into an advanced AI platform that leverages a 'logic programming' approach, applying set rules to combine and analyze various biomedical data sources," says Dr. Lambert. "This could enable researchers to identify potential drug repurposing opportunities, generate hypotheses and uncover novel insights into disease mechanisms." 

She says the approach could also reduce the time and cost associated with developing new therapies and provide hope for patients with limited treatment options. 

Oliver's Impact

Oliver's impact extends beyond medical advancements. As his care unfolded during the challenging times of COVID-19, he also inspired Mayo's pediatric palliative care team to start a tele-hospice program. This ensured that children in hospice care could continue to receive compassionate support remotely. 

"All of the providers who cared for Oliver learned so much from him and his family, including how helpful it was to have real-time video assessment of patients with challenging pain and symptoms during in-home hospice visits by nurses," says Christopher Collura, M.D., the medical director of Pediatric Palliative Care (ComPASS) at Mayo. "This inspired our team to formalize a tele-hospice program in order to streamline assessments by pediatric palliative medicine physicians for children enrolled with Mayo Clinic Hospice." 

Honoring Oliver and Welcoming His Baby Sister 

Throughout Oliver's life and even in his final hours, Dr. Thompson and her team formed a tight, supportive relationship with Oliver and his family, providing comfort and care when it was most needed. 

"Dr. Thompson was really there for us during the hardest time of our lives. And she has continued to support us after Oliver's death," Justine says. "Every year she joins us to honor his memory at our balloon release on Oliver's birthday." 

The Bates family also reached out to Dr. Thompson for guidance on the potential for having another child. 

WOREE syndrome, the genetic condition that affected Oliver, is a recessive disorder. That means both parents carry a copy of the mutated gene but usually show no symptoms. Each pregnancy has a 25% chance of the child inheriting two defective genes — one from each parent — which leads to the disease. Using these genetic insights, Dr. Thompson helped guide the Bates family to the subspecialists who helped them choose a plan that would increase the likelihood of a healthy pregnancy unaffected by the same genetic condition that Oliver had. 

In May, Oliver's legacy was further celebrated with the birth of his baby sister. Justine and Casey named her Whitney, in tribute to Dr. Thompson, reflecting their deep gratitude for the care and dedication Dr. Thompson gave to Oliver and their family. 

"I am deeply touched by this gesture," Dr. Thompson says. "Oliver's story shows us that new beginnings can coexist with cherished memories to help provide healing and comfort."

This article was originally published in Mayo Clinic News Network. 

The post Baby Oliver Leaves Legacy of Genomic Advances at Mayo Clinic appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.