The Mayo Clinic has recently announced a collaboration with TruLite Health, a Phoenix-based startup. TruLite Health is creating a platform aimed at mitigating providers’ clinical biases. A know-how license agreement with Mayo has been developed, and through this agreement, three physicians specializing in community internal medicine at Mayo Clinic Arizona are aiding in the development of TruLite’s technology.
TruLite Health was established in 2022 by Alan Roga, a physician with twenty years of medical practice experience and the former chief clinical operations officer at Teladoc Health. The initiative seeks to nullify healthcare disparity primarily from demographic and medical biases that affect patient outcomes, especially chronic illnesses.
Their technology, Truity, obtains demographic and medical data of patients and cross-references the information with TruLite’s health equity research database. This database comprises peer-reviewed studies that underline patient outcomes based on factors such as race, gender, or sexual orientation and the majority of this research centers around chronic illnesses.
After processing a patient’s information, the technology identifies potential biases that the provider may have and provides recommendations about addressing them. TruLite ensures that this information is made available to the entire care team – doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers, and the patients themselves. It provides virtual health equity coaching allowing patients to better advocate for themselves in navigating the healthcare system.
The goal of this collaboration is to enhance and tailor the user interface of TruLite’s platform with a focus on integrating it into Mayo’s EHR and working towards workflow enhancements with user feedback. According to Dr. Nathan Delafield, one of the physicians involved, Mayo Clinic is actively exploring innovative technologies to further health equity and eliminate disparities in healthcare.
He continued to point out that the roots of this multifaceted problem are situated partly in implicit bias, skewed clinical tools, inadequate education for healthcare providers, and fragmented information related to patient-specific factors that contribute to disparities. Mayo Clinic is dedicated to fighting these issues. Any revenue Mayo receives from this collaboration will be used to support its patient care, education, and research initiatives.
With the drive to improve health outcomes and achieve health equity at its core, this collaboration offers a solution to alleviate and eventually eradicate clinical bias, reinforcing healthcare as a human right accessible to all regardless of demographic.