Healthcare automation at Mayo Clinic: Enhancing care

The Mayo Clinic is highly ranked in a long list of medical specialties, and it has embarked on a journey to use healthcare automation as a key resource in maintaining its world-renowned reputation for patient treatment and care.

Through technologies that encompass artificial intelligence and 3D printing, the clinic has embraced tech tools not merely for reading CAT scans, but also to improve the important relationship between physician and patient.

The Mayo Clinic’s Biju Samkutty and Anjali Bhagra talk with theCUBE about healthcare automation at UiPath Forward 2024.

“As a practicing radiologist, reading hundreds of X-rays, CAT scans, and literally playing a game of finding Waldo in an attempt to diagnose the disease is a pretty daunting task,” said Anjali Bhagra, M.D., (pictured, right), physician lead and chair, Automation Core, at the Mayo Clinic. “Imagine now all the state-of-the-art automations that we can utilize and deploy. For the first time, I actually see that I can give that human touch to my patients because these technologies enable my diagnostic capability, they cut down my administrative time on tasks that actually pull me away from my patients.”

Bhagra spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and co-host Rebecca Knight at UiPath Forward 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Biju Samkutty (left), chief operating officer of the Mayo Clinic, and they discussed healthcare automation and how Mayo Clinic is pursuing its technology transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Healthcare automation: Piecing together a mountain of data

The need to sift through and properly evaluate reams of information can be especially important at the Mayo Clinic because of its reputation. By the time a patient enters the facility for treatment, it may be the third or fourth stop on a long journey through the medical system.

“At Mayo Clinic, we’re a tertiary or quaternary center … patients have gone to two, three other locations a lot of times before they come to us,” Samkutty explained. “Now we have that much more medical records, that much more documents that need to be knitted and pieced together to figure out if there’s a right solution or the right opportunity, a right way to approach it.”

Technology is also transforming how organizations can support breakthroughs in medical research. Bhagra has seen advances through the ability to capture and evaluate large amounts of patient data gathered from across the world.

“If you look at discovery cycles in medicine, they tend to be very long, and they tend to be very tedious,” Bhagra said. “There’s a large number of registries, for example, where we are doing cancer trials and we need to reach patients that are remotely located across the country, across the globe. Automation really allows for democratizing access for discovery tools to a large number of patients so that we move everybody along.”

For the staff at Mayo Clinic, moving everyone along means not sacrificing trust during the journey. The physicians must trust what the technology is telling them, and patients must believe they are receiving the highest level of care because of it.

“A lot of what we’re spending time on is not getting lost in the shiny new tool, but starting to lay out what healthcare transformation fundamentally looks like,” Samkutty said. “What we are starting to do from a healthcare transformation standpoint is really get caught up in how we deploy technologies in a way that we can prove out and trust the value of the data, put intuition and the experience of our great physicians back where they should be at solving the final problem.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of UiPath Forward 2024:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for UiPath Forward. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE