Mercy Collaborates with Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies to Harness Real-World Data for Patient Safety and Device Innovation

ST. LOUIS, July 2, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Mercy, named one of the top five large U.S. health systems by IBM Watson Health, has established a data platform that uses real-world clinical data to evaluate medical device performance. Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies (JJMDC) has entered into a research collaboration with Mercy to utilize this platform.

"We began this project to make sure the devices Mercy uses work for patients," said Dr. Joseph Drozda, Mercy's director of outcomes research and pioneer in using unique device identifiers for tracking implanted medical devices (e.g., coronary stents, pacemakers, etc.). "With more than 8,000 new medical devices entering the market each year, it's critical that we find better ways to evaluate their performance." JJMDC will utilize Mercy's data infrastructure to inform and improve regulatory decision making and health outcomes for medical devices.

The JJMDC and Mercy collaboration comes just months after another device manufacturer announced a similar data partnership with Mercy.  Dr. Drozda believes this type of exchange is catching on because the Food and Drug Administration is encouraging the use of real-world data to evaluate medical devices.  "Not only does Mercy have diverse data, we have the data platform, quality, scale and sophisticated data scientists to turn this data into meaningful information. That's critical where patient outcomes are concerned," said Dr. Drozda.

Since Mercy installed its Epic EHR more than a decade ago, Mercy's IT backbone and recognized analytics leader Mercy Technology Services has been building it out. Today, Mercy has accumulated millions of data points in longitudinal patient records with more data accessible from fields versus being obscured in physician notes within the EHR. Where Mercy still has data in a note, it uses award-winning natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to extract and measure it.

Learn more about Mercy's work on this initiative here: http://mdepinet.org/build/

SOURCE Mercy