Mosaic, Mayo Clinic celebrate 10-year partnership
Sep. 30—Mosaic Life Care is celebrating 10 years of being a member of the Mayo Clinic Care Network, providing access to medical consulting, education resources and lectures to the St. Joseph area.
Mosaic was the fourth hospital in the country to join the Mayo Clinic Care Network.
One advantage of the network is that resources extend to different medical facilities beyond the Mayo Clinic itself, said Edward Kammerer, Mosaic Life Care chief medical officer.
"If you were to look at all the consults, I mean, we utilize them for many things besides oncology," he said. "So surgery, radiology, image reading — high tech procedures — so internal medicine, rheumatology we utilize their services or that e-consult the ability to use the Mayo Clinic knowledge to help supplement what we're doing or to give a second opinion for a patient so they don't have to travel."
One of the most important aspects is the push to provide top-level medical care while allowing more patients to stay in an environment they're familiar with, said Clark Otley, Mayo Clinic Platform chief medical officer. Having access to better medicine and technology means patients in some cases can even receive care without leaving home, he said.
"We're taking care of patients who have hospital-level illnesses in their homes by bringing technology and people, and medications and imaging machines into their homes," Otley said. "Very complicated, but once you establish that kind of level of service, it's possible to take care of patients with more severe conditions than you'd expect in their home. So, that's something that we're early pioneers in."
That's one way in which COVID-19 forced innovation, Otley said, because it led to hospitals embracing telemedicine and other forms of care that didn't require patients to visit the hospital's location.
Access to the care network helps keep Mosaic on the cutting edge, Kammerer said.
"We have the ability to, to participate in some of the best, innovative treatments in the world, and we can bring those to our community," he said. "We're bringing them to the Middle America, to St. Joseph where, again, this is a difficult opportunity for people to go up to Mayo Clinic. We can bring it here."
Even in terms of remote care, there are steps being taken to allow for more intense procedures to be completed with the help of robots, which presents the possibility that doctors don't even have to be on-site, Kammerer said.
Alex Simone can be reached at alex.simone@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter at @NPNOWSimone.
