Mayo Clinic announced Friday that it was adding Dartmouth-Hitchcock, a nonprofit health system in New Hampshire, to the Mayo Clinic Care Network.
The Mayo Clinic Care Network uses the Affiliated Practice Network model to expand care in local communities by connecting healthcare providers in those areas to the expertise at Mayo.
Under the terms of the agreement, Dartmouth-Hitchcock will remain independent while its physicians will be able to access the resources of Mayo. They include tools that allow physician-to-physician consultations, point-of-care database of best-practice information on disease management, care guidelines, treatment recommendations and reference materials.
Patients in the community will most likely reap the benefits of this collaboration as they can tap into Mayo expertise for a second opinion without having to leave their community.
Dr. John Noseworthy, the CEO of Mayo Clinic, hailed the partnership and said the founders of Mayo believed that a “union of forces is required to best serve the needs of patients.”
Dr. James Weinstein, his counterpart at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, pointed out that the relationship between the two organizations goes “back 85 years.”
Noseworthy and others who were at Dartmouth-Hitchcock in Lebanon, New Hampshire for the announcement repeatedly talked about the importance of finding new ways to take care of patients that achieve better outcomes at a cost level that can be sustained.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Yet, they provided little detail on how this collaboration would achieve that much-needed cost efficiency.
Aside from the announcement Friday, the two healthcare providers are also mulling a number of different joint projects. They include advancing population health using large data systems, expanded clinical and basic research, joint educational initiatives and advancement of the science of healthcare delivery.
