The Mayo Clinic Is Partnering With An Augmented Reality Company To Transform Healthcare Delivery

The Mayo Clinic is one of the world’s most celebrated and renowned medical institutions, and is home to among the most brilliant minds in medicine, cutting-edge healthcare research, and continued innovation. In its latest venture, the organization has decided to take a bold step forward in care delivery by parterning with MediView, a leading clinical augmented reality med-tech company.

Per the press release, “Mayo Clinic will provide clinical, technology, and research expertise to MediView” with the intent to ‘further accelerate innovation in the development of solutions to improve clinical workflow, enhance remote collaboration, simplify minimally invasive procedures, and remove barriers to patient access.”

Mina Fahim, President and CEO of MediView, explains: “We are thrilled to explore new clinical adoption of practice-altering extended reality solutions. We will equip practitioners with intuitive surgical visualization and navigation tools to inform clinical decision making to confidently deliver better care to more patients.”

The Mayo Clinic is certainly a great arena to validate this technology. The hospital organization employs more than 73,000 people and cares for more than 1.4 million people annually. As Mayo is universally renowned for its cutting edge research, it is also one of the largest centers for novel therapies, attracting patients from around the globe.

MediView’s technology is a bold step forward with regards to care delivery. With its innovation, new horizons are possible: remote collaboration, augmented reality visualization, and holographic interventions. As the digital health sector continues to grow, healthcare companies and organizations have become increasingly focused on finding solutions for remote collaboration and viable uses of virtual reality.

MediView is just one example of a company that is rapidly innovating in this space. Microsoft’s Hololens is one of the most mature products in the market, and touts some of the most innovative applications for the technology. Per Microsoft, Hololens has “Reduced training by 30% at an average savings of $63 per hour; Reduced average annual PPE costs by 75%, savings $954 per employee; and [has] Improved efficiency by 30% to complete ward rounds at an average savings of $41 per hour.”

With regards to remote collaboration and imaging, Philips’ Lumify product not only offers incredible imaging hardware, but hosts advanced software which enables live collaboration and telehealth capabilities.

This is also another pertinent and potential application that many technology and healthcare enthusiasts hope to see with Meta’s array of virtual and augmented reality hardware. In conjunction with its incredible network infrastructure and ability to connect people, Meta shows great promise with regards to this vision.

The keys to success in this arena are multifold. First, companies must ensure that patient safety is prioritized, above all else. Second, innovators and technologists must pay close attention to the protections and safety measures placed with regards to data fidelity. Finally, innovators must stay nimble, ready to learn from their mistakes quickly and rapidly evolve, as the industry will undoubtedly demand in the coming years.