Discover three ways Platform is translating vision into action — and data into solutions.

‘Virtual Clinical Trials’ Point to New Treatment Options for Heart Failure

Bringing a new drug therapy to market can cost up to $1 billion and take over a decade. As drug testing and approvals slowly unfold, many patients continue to suffer. But what if there was a way to test the ability of existing drugs to treat challenging conditions?

Using data drawn from Mayo Clinic Platform — specifically, the de-identified records of nearly 60,000 patients with heart failure — Nansu Zong, Ph.D., and his team were able to virtually assess the ability of certain already-approved drugs to treat heart failure. Instead of recruiting participants, the team drew on patient records to form control groups. They then used advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models that predict how drugs interact with biological systems to determine outcomes. This approach allowed researchers to rapidly test over a dozen medications already on the market without requiring the lengthy, difficult process of conducting a full clinical trial for each one.

“We’ve shown that within our framework, we can say with high confidence if a drug is likely to succeed or not,” Dr. Zong says. The results of the study have been published in NPJ Digital Medicine.

Mayo Clinic teams are now working to refine this new virtual approach to drug testing. While real-world clinical trials will always be essential, virtual options could help to expand and supplement their findings.

To learn more, visit Mayo Clinic News Network.

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15 Startups Use Platform Data to Shape Solutions

Mayo Clinic Platform regularly accepts promising tech startups into its incubator program, Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate. Participants gain access to Platform data — and the insights of Mayo Clinic experts — as they refine their devices, apps, algorithms and other products. The companies below all “graduated” in the April 2025 Accelerate cohort:

• Bloom Standard has developed a device that can be used to provide quick and effective heart and lung ultrasounds for children.
• Ethos uses AI to monitor alcohol use and predict risk of liver disease and other complications.
• OPTT is a digital mental health platform that provides clinicians with validated tools for evaluating and treating patients more effectively.
• Smart Opinion, Inc. uses AI to detect breast cancer earlier, particularly in women with dense breast tissue.
• Splink, Inc. is harnessing the power of AI to deliver earlier diagnoses for brain disorders like dementia, depression and schizophrenia.
• Voythos uses machine learning to help surgeons predict when patients with complex aortic disease may experience complications, allowing for earlier and more effective interventions.

Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate aims to speed up the development of innovative healthcare solutions that can improve patient care and transform medicine.

To learn more about these startups and other Accelerate graduates, visit Mayo Clinic News Network.

PlatforMed Conference Generates Patient-Focused Insights

In June 2025, Mayo Clinic hosted more than 250 leaders from healthcare, government, business and academia at the PlatforMed conference in Minneapolis. The goal: To discuss how sharing data and collaborating through platform technologies produces better care for patients. Speaker highlights included:

• John D. Halamka, M.D., M.S., Dwight and Dian Diercks President of Mayo Clinic Platform, who described how platform-based advances will help aging patients consistently access quality care. The automation and accessibility that platform tools deliver will ensure these patients aren’t overlooked in a future where healthcare resources may be more limited.
• Maneesh Goyal, chief operating officer of Mayo Clinic Platform, who discussed how Mayo Clinic Platform is enabling an average of 60 patients a day to receive hospital-quality care at home through the Advanced Care at Home program. He likened this Platform-powered development to a new “virtual floor” connected to existing Mayo Clinic hospitals.
• Patrick Woodard, M.D., M.H.A., of Monument Health, who explained how platform technologies are helping democratize access to care. As chief information officer of a hospital in rural South Dakota, he can use shared data and tools to ensure his patients have access to the same standard of care as patients in major urban centers.
• Deepak Abraham, Ph.D., M.B.A., of King Hamad American Mission Hospital in Bahrain, who discussed how platform technologies are helping providers save time on tasks like data entry, allowing them to spend more time interacting directly with patients. “The doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct,” he emphasized. “Platform enhances that.”

To hear more from these and other speakers, watch the episode of Tomorrow’s Cure below, which was recorded at the conference.

The post 3 Ways Mayo Clinic Platform Impacts Patient Care appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Delfina

“Post-COVID, maternal health is the public health challenge of our time,” says Senan Ebrahim, M.D., Ph.D., the CEO of Delfina — referencing the fact that the U.S. maternal mortality rate is nearly twice as high as that of other high-income countries. Delfina is on a mission to change this.

The app the company has created enables users to monitor their physical and mental health as pregnancy progresses and alerts them to any risks. It also provides services that make the pregnancy experience smoother. For example, users can contact a doula who can answer questions about everything from prenatal vitamins to the best places to buy maternity swimwear.

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First and foremost, though, is Delfina’s commitment to protecting the health of mothers and babies. Dr. Ebrahim highlights the experience of a patient in Texas who realized — thanks to the app’s remote monitoring capabilities — that her blood pressure had shot up. She contacted her physician, who promptly sent her to the emergency room. There, it was discovered that she had developed gestational hypertension. She was induced and had a safe vaginal delivery the same day. “She and her physician both attribute that great outcome to Delfina,” Dr. Ebrahim says.

The Accelerate program was vital in ensuring the success and growth that Delfina is experiencing. “It’s not every day that a top academic institution opens its doors to a company that hasn’t even existed for a year and says, ‘Yeah, let’s help you make sure the product you’re going to put out into the world meets the very highest clinical, scientific and safety standards,’” Dr. Ebrahim says. “Mayo brought in experts to show us how to build this product in a best-in-class way that’s safe for patients. That gave us the confidence to take these models out to market.”

Delfina now envisions a future where they’re able to provide long-term support to patients, optimizing their health from before they conceive through the postpartum period. With offices in New York City, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Rochester, Minnesota, Delfina is growing — and supporting Mayo Clinic’s goal of making the area around its Rochester campus a hub for tech innovation and entrepreneurship in the Midwest.

The post Delfina appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

C the Signs

A primary care physician in Britain’s National Health System, Bea Bakshi, M.D., was inspired to start C the Signs after encountering a patient in the emergency room late one night. The patient’s symptoms — which had been overlooked in earlier medical visits — turned out to be pancreatic cancer. Sadly, he died just three weeks later.

“Cancer is one of those diseases that is so time critical,” Dr. Bakshi says. She began to wonder how physicians could identify patients at risk of cancer earlier. Soon afterward, C the Signs was born.

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The company focuses on developing artificial intelligence models for different tumor types. These models analyze data in a patient’s medical record and patient-reported data, informing the patient or provider if there is evidence of cancer risk. The C the Signs algorithm then tracks the patient moving forward, monitoring if and when they do receive a cancer diagnosis. Known in the tech industry as a “closed-loop learning approach,” this method helps C the Signs refine their models.

The company’s time in the Accelerate program provided a further degree of refinement, with the C the Signs team digging into Mayo Clinic’s data to conduct retrospective testing. “We actually had the opportunity to see if we could intercept cancers earlier than the time and date of the diagnosis by physicians at Mayo,” Dr. Bakshi explains. Her team examined data related to the five types of cancer with the highest mortality rates in the U.S. — breast, colorectal, lung, prostate and pancreatic cancer — and found they were able to detect cancer up to five years earlier in 26% of patients. “That was phenomenal for us, and a really exciting research opportunity that we’re planning to publish,” Dr. Bakshi says.

After its stint in Accelerate, C the Signs was chosen to participate in the White House CancerX Accelerator, part of an initiative by the U.S. government to reduce cancer mortality by at least 50% over the next 25 years. Dr. Bakshi’s team is also preparing to launch a prospective study in partnership with Mayo Clinic.

“We’ve detected 50,000 patients with cancer in the UK. In five years’ time, I want to be talking about the number of patient lives we’ve saved in the United States,” Dr. Bakshi says. “That’s what good looks like for us.”

The post C the Signs appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Luminare

Luminare sparked excitement among the Accelerate team because it was taking an approach to sepsis — the No. 1 cause of patient death in hospitals — that no one had seen before. Instead of following the conventional pathway of creating an AI model that can predict sepsis, Luminare was examining how it could improve workflow for hospitals. Better workflow, the team found, will naturally lead to improved sepsis detection and more timely treatments for patients.

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After successfully implementing their model at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center — which was able to decrease sepsis mortality by 18.7% and shorten the length of ICU stays by 22.5% — and several other hospitals, the Luminare team came to Mayo Clinic to test and strengthen their workflow system using Mayo Clinic Platform’s dataset.

“Without going through Accelerate, I don’t think our company would have gotten to where we are today,” says CEO Sarma Velamuri, M.D.

Dr. Velamuri looks forward to enhancing and expanding Luminare’s digital tool and bringing it to market in the near future, thanks to the partnership of the Accelerate team and the boost Luminare has received as one of the first participants in Mayo Clinic Platform’s Solutions Studio (which has provided additional development and validation for Luminare’s digital tool).

“Our top goal is expansion in the U.S. healthcare system, and then internationally,” Dr. Velamuri says. “We want to be the leading player in sepsis and set the benchmarks for care. We want to say, ‘Look, here’s what good sepsis care for your loved ones looks like.’ And all so we can get them back home where they belong.”

The post Luminare appeared first on Mayo Clinic Magazine.

Three times per year, a group of hand-selected startups enter the 30-week program. Participants are given access to the deep, high-quality data available through Mayo Clinic Platform. With data access, they can build and test their algorithms and begin to integrate them into real-world healthcare settings. The Accelerate team also assembles a group of expert advisors for each startup and pairs each company with a Mayo Clinic mentor — typically a clinician in the branch of medicine the company focuses on. Through research and collaboration, startups gain firsthand insights into how their products will work in the clinical space.

We want to work with startups because we speak their language. We can really focus in on them and help them access the resources we have. We’re empowering them to bring their products to clinicians and patients.

— Jamie Sundsbak, senior manager of Accelerate

Graduates of Accelerate are already transforming the healthcare world, raising around $145 million as of February 2025 in the drive to bring their products to market. And most importantly, they are producing impactful new solutions for patients everywhere.

One company, C the Signs, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan a patient's electronic health record and predict cancer risk with a high degree of accuracy. Another, Delfina, created a pregnancy support app that has been downloaded by thousands of patients. A third, Luminare, created a screening system to improve the treatment of patients with sepsis in hospitals that was launched with considerable success at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. After using Mayo Clinic’s data to refine their platform, Luminare is aiming to bring its lifesaving product to more hospitals.

‘Foot on the Gas’

The first five weeks of Accelerate are dedicated to onboarding. During this time, “the Accelerate team starts to build a relationship with each and every individual participating in the program,” explains Jamie Sundsbak, the senior manager of Accelerate. “We want to get to know them. We want to understand what keeps them up at night and what they are hoping to accomplish.” Companies participate in Accelerate virtually, which provides valuable flexibility. Notably, nearly half of the companies that have participated so far are international.

“By week six, we want these companies to have a game plan,” Sundsbak says. “That’s when we give them access to our cloud. So leading up to that, we help them set goals. We work with them and their technical teams to kind of pre-navigate the data, and we have a comprehensive discussion about data safety and the ethics of data use. Then, the next 20 weeks is just foot on the gas.”

What does this next period look like for a young company’s leaders? For Bea Bakshi, M.D., the CEO of C the Signs, it meant digging into Mayo Clinic’s data to retrospectively test her company’s models.

“We actually had the opportunity to see if we could intercept cancers earlier than the time and date of the diagnosis by physicians at Mayo,” she explains. Her team examined data related to the five types of cancer with the highest mortality rates in the U.S. — breast, colorectal, lung, prostate and pancreatic cancer — and found that their model was effective in detecting cancer up to five years earlier in 26% of patients.

“That was phenomenal for us, and a really exciting research opportunity that we’re planning to publish,” Dr. Bakshi says.

Eureka Moments

Each company in Accelerate has the opportunity to work with Mayo Clinic’s rich data in the way that best suits their needs, just as C the Signs did.

For example, Luminare CEO Sarma Velamuri, M.D., and his team were able to begin identifying core phenotypes that make a patient more likely to develop sepsis during a hospital stay. “This was a eureka moment that happened when we were looking at the data,” Dr. Velamuri explains. “This pattern emerged, and we realized that there were common denominators to patients with sepsis. It was the first time in five years of working on sepsis full-time that I had this big ‘aha’ moment.”

Meanwhile, Delfina CEO Senan Ebrahim, M.D., Ph.D., and his team approached the data with an exploratory mindset as they considered how they could more effectively scan patients for pregnancy risks. “This data on tens of thousands of patients was more representative of the full spectrum of risk than anything we’ve seen previously,” Dr. Ebrahim says. Delfina already had high-performing predictive models for identifying patients who would benefit from care plans that prevent hypertension and gestational diabetes. With access to Mayo’s data, they were able to build models for predicting a patient’s risk of excessive gestational weight gain as well.

Keeping Up the Pace

After the 30 weeks are up and a company has “graduated” from Accelerate, its relationship with Mayo Clinic often continues. Some companies collaborate with Mayo teams to launch pilots or clinical trials, while others participate in Platform’s Solutions Studio, which helps them develop and validate their solutions and deploy them into workflows. Many of them also retain close ties with their cohort members and clinical mentors. The yearly Graduation Showcase event hosted by the Accelerate team gives companies the opportunity to present their product to Mayo Clinic at large, as well as to potential customers from Mayo Clinic Care Network and other institutions. This means that the work — and networking — doesn’t end after graduation.

“We want to work with startups because we speak their language,” Sundsbak says. “We can really focus in on them and help them access the resources we have. We’re empowering them to bring their products to clinicians and patients. We want them to leave the program feeling like it was the best possible thing they could have ever done.”

With the program attracting dynamic new cohorts multiple times each year, there are infinite opportunities for the Accelerate team to keep empowering young companies. No one is taking their foot off the gas anytime soon.

The post Fast-Tracking Cures 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.

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.

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.

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.