Rochester, Minnesota - Mayo Clinic is collaborating with Epic to offer trusted, expert care plans and patient-facing content through Epic’s MyChart Virtual Care within the MyChart mobile app. Getting the best clinical knowledge into the hands of patients and health care providers via this technology supports delivering better outcomes for patients and reduces the total cost of care for chronic conditions.
Mayo Clinic Care Plans are developed from evidence-based and physician-vetted health information, and patient education content, and are included within MyChart Virtual Care. Mayo Clinic Care Plans support patients and care teams by providing step-by-step care directions and support when and where it’s needed most. This includes providing decision guidance and education that may include previsit, midtreatment, and post-visit planning and support.
MyChart Virtual Care ─ new with Epic’s 2018 release and delivered through the MyChart mobile app for iOS and Android ─ can be offered by health care providers to their at-risk patients to improve their chronic disease self-management. Patients with newly diagnosed chronic conditions have easy access to Mayo Clinic’s expert content, enabling them to educate themselves at the time of their chronic condition diagnosis. This better engages patients in caring for their conditions and reinforces positive habits shown to make a difference in one’s health. It delivers digitally enabled, interactive individual plans of care within the MyChart app, eliminating the need to toggle among different apps to access the information, while offering patients and providers a consistent, streamlined and familiar user experience.
The user-friendly app also can send care notifications and analyze data provided by patients and/or connected devices to adapt the plan dynamically. This can help patients, caregivers and care managers stay on top of a patient’s care. It also allows them to intervene before a small health deviation becomes a larger health problem requiring a potentially costly emergency room visit or hospitalization. Through this strategic collaboration with Mayo Clinic Care Plans, patients and caregivers can get accurate, reliable guidance from a world-class health care organization.
“Mayo Clinic Care Plans deliver the most trusted content and guidance based on more than 150 years of medical practice,” says Steve Ommen, M.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who is medical director of Mayo Clinic Center for Connected Care. “Patients, health care providers, care managers and other caregivers can have confidence that the care plan, health information and patient education content from Mayo Clinic, and available through MyChart Virtual Care, is there to help them more actively engage in, and better manage, one’s health, improve outcomes, and potentially bend the cost curve in the process.”
“Integrating Mayo Clinic Care Plans into MyChart Virtual Care will help simplify and improve patient engagement, while helping providers and caregivers better manage patient health and well-being,” says Carl Dvorak, president, Epic. “We look forward to continued innovation with Mayo Clinic on this and other collaborations.”
Many other tools are built to be condition-specific, but Mayo Clinic and Epic are working together on a platform and content that can scale across a wide range of conditions. Mayo Clinic-vetted content initially offered includes care plans for:
- Asthma
- Type 2 diabetes
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder
- Congestive heart failure
- Orthopedic surgery, hip/knee joint replacement
Mayo Clinic Care Plans will be continually developed for MyChart Virtual Care to reflect the latest care knowledge and guidance. This content is available in English, and, for participating health systems, is accessible anytime, anywhere in the U.S. and Canada through the MyChart mobile platform.