Alphabet’s life science subsidiary Verily is teaming up with the Mayo Clinic on a new effort to develop a digital point-of-care clinical decision support tool. The partnership will start by zeroing in on cardiometabolic conditions, and is directed at contextualizing information and giving care guidelines to clinicians. 

In the partnership, the Mayo Clinic will be responsible for the clinical content from its multidiscipline and multispecialty practices. Verily will take on the tech side, providing its clinical analytics to deliver the insights to healthcare professionals. 

The goal is for clinicians to tap into a number of data resources from Mayo Clinic-approved sources and de-identified health record data. The pair plan to first launch the tool at the Mayo Clinic, but it could expand to other hospitals.

WHY IT MATTERS 

The collaboration is pitched as a way to help clinicians quickly tap into guidelines and information in order to boost patient care. 

According to an AMA survey, an increasing number of doctors are using clinical decision support tools. In 2019, 37% of clinicians reported currently using a clinical decision support tool, up from 28% in 2016. 

"The exponential growth in medical discovery and knowledge has reached the point where it is almost impossible for caregivers to keep up with the latest advances. This tool will make Mayo Clinic's deep expertise available to care teams so that they can have concise, relevant and applicable answers to clinical questions, tailored to specific needs of each patient," said Bradley Leibovich, M.D, medical director of Mayo Clinic's Center for Digital Health. "We hope it can be used as a GPS for patient care."

THE LARGER TREND

In December, Verily landed $700 million in funding to expand its business. Since then, the company has been busy. Last week it acquired clinical trial management system SignalPath in order to help build out its clinical trial platform Baseline, which works in the decentralized clinical trial and hybrid trial space. 

In early August, the company announced a partnership with dental care company Colgate-Palmolive in an effort to find the link between oral health and overall health. 

Earlier this week news broke that Verily’s sister company Google is dismantling its health division, instead dispersing its Google Health team to other departments. So far there has been no mention of Verily in the news and whether or not it would be positioned to absorb any of these efforts.