CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & ROCHESTER, Minn. — Optum and Mayo Clinic launched Optum Labs, an open, collaborative research and development facility with a singular goal: improving patient care. Based in Cambridge, Mass., Optum Labs provides an environment where the healthcare industry can come together to combine information and ideas that benefit patients today, while also driving long-term improvements in the delivery and quality of care.
Optum and Mayo Clinic will make information assets, technologies, knowledge tools and scientific expertise available to organizations interested in pursuing practical new solutions to patient care challenges. Mayo Clinic will also contribute valuable insights directly from patient experiences. Other participants will include academic institutions, life sciences companies, commercial and government payers and other care providers.
The labs will support patient care improvements in many areas, such as:
- finding optimal treatments for conditions in a given setting;
- understanding variations in care; and
- examining the effectiveness of patient care programs and approaches
Using the rich data and other resources of labs, scientists will address a broad range of opportunities to improve care. Examples of the work of scientists include measuring the best treatments for the serious blood cancer chronic myelogenous leukemia, developing applications that measure the relative cost effectiveness of medical devices, analyzing how to improve the diagnosis of Hepatitis C and increasing the understanding of health disparities among the elderly.
“By combining the Mayo Clinic’s robust clinical insight with Optum’s extensive claims information, we will be able to better understand healthcare delivery over time, compare the effectiveness of care we provide today, and analyze the total cost of care for specific procedures or diseases,” said Veronique Roger, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Mayo Clinic Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery. “This will help provide better care to patients, and help the healthcare industry better define value through outcomes instead of volumes.”
