Israel's Sheba Medical Center becomes part of Mayo Clinic’s global alliance

Israel’s Sheba Medical Center was recently integrated into the Mayo Clinic Platform, a cutting-edge healthcare innovation which seeks to harness new technologies to change the way health care is provided.

The platform, developed by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, United States, is expanding its distributed data network worldwide and has chosen the Sheba to be part of its first-of-its kind global alliance.

The alliance will allegedly create a data-sharing network to transcend language barriers, allowing for accelerated AI-based solutions to improve patient health worldwide.

The Mayo Clinic Platform Connect provides secure, cloud-based access to de-identified clinical data across three continents.

“Healthcare data must have depth, breadth and heterogeneity for fair and equitable AI,” according to the president of the platform, Mayo Clinic’s John Halamka.

Expanding distributed data networks to every continent is necessary to transform healthcare globally, while privacy and compliance with international laws and regulations must be upheld, Halamka explained.

Until recently, integrated electronic medical record data, radiology and pathology images, and videos were too complex to analyze, and language diversity was a significant barrier to consolidating clinical data globally.

With privacy-protected storage and the growth of AI and machine learning, the Mayo Clinic Platform and Connect members will use aggregated, de-identified clinical data to generate models to spot diseases earlier and identify the best treatment options.

In addition, the network will have access to a wealth of clinical data from Israel, which will “expand the depth and heterogeneity of the network, contributing to more accurate and comprehensive AI models.”

Director of Transformation and Innovation at the Sheba Medical Center, Prof. Eyal Zimlichman, expressed excitement about the new venture which is intended to improve patient health outcomes by accelerating the development of innovative and effective treatments.

"We are thrilled to be part of this historic alliance to transform the future of healthcare," he said.

The other two hospitals integrated into the Mayo Clinic Platform’s global alliance are the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in Brazil and the University Health Network in Canada.