Mayo Clinic, Sheba Medical Center team up on healthcare technology

The Mayo Clinic is working with Sheba Medical Center in Israel to help support startup healthcare companies, with hopes of yielding medical breakthroughs.

The two healthcare institutions signed an agreement this week to help develop new healthcare technologies. Both health organizations have recently developed their own programs to help startup companies.

The systems said in a news release the partnership will initially focus on startup companies from those programs: the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate and Sheba’s ARC Innovation Center.

John Halamka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform, said the agreement will help foster technologies that can improve healthcare. In a video accompanying the announcement, Halamka outlined what the partnership will bring in a world beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re going to see more machine learning, more technologies to help our patients worldwide,” Halamka said. “But we need enormous amounts of experience. The patient data of the past will inform patient care in the future. Mayo and Sheba collaborating will create technologies and innovations greater than the sum of the parts.”

Halamka discusses the partnership in detail in this video by Mayo Clinic News Network. (The story continues after the video.)

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Eyal Zimlichman, chief information and transformation officer at ARC Innovation Center, said in a news release the organizations “are committed to transform health on a global scale.”

“This collaboration will allow us to accelerate development and large-scale implementation of cutting-edge technologies,” Zimlichman said. “And at the end of the day, this work will provide value to patients, families and communities. We look forward to the journey ahead.”

The partnership is going to be very focused on health equity to make sure the new technologies developed can be utilized widely, Halamka said.

“We’re going to deliver fair, equitable, unbiased and useful technology, and that’s hard,” he said in the video. “Because it may very well be that a technology is developed in a geography where it works fabulously in one place for one kind of patient, but how do you make it work globally? And the Sheba-Mayo collaboration is about global impact.”

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The two systems signed the agreement this week at the Sixth Mayo-Sheba Annual Cardiovascular Symposium on the Sheba Medical Center campus in Tel Aviv.

The Mayo Clinic and Sheba have collaborated since 2016, with cardiology and nephrology experts working together and sharing information to improve patient care.

Halamka said the “cultural alignment” of the two institutions is a critical ingredient of the collaboration and why he has high expectations for the partnership. “When I look at the values of Mayo Clinic and the values of Sheba, I believe these two organizations are the most culturally aligned of any international partnership,” he said.

Halamka joined the Mayo Clinic more than two years ago after working as chief information officer at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He said he has seen the value of collaborations that help generate new ideas.

“It’s these joint ventures, collaborations and partnerships that bring us to new heights,” he said Halamka said in the video. “This is the first international collaboration between two organizations to scale. We really think this is going to be a game-changer.”

Both the Mayo Clinic and Sheba Medical Center have earned worldwide recognition. Both institutions earned spots in the top 10 in Newsweek’s ranking of the world’s best hospitals. Mayo topped the list, and Sheba ranked 10th.