What's a Platform Go Live?

As we plan our go-lives for the Mayo Clinic Platform, we recently discussed how best to measure what constitutes a go-live.

First, let's review what Platform thinking (technology, policy, people and process) can do for an organization.

*Facilitates collaborations and partnerships with external entities (i.e. participants on the Platform benefit from the presence of other participants)
*Connects assets (data, algorithms, expertise) with customers in ethical, privacy protecting ways
*Supports the development of ideas into products that may be licensed, spun out, or sold as services
*Has turnkey technology and policy approaches that empower innovators to incubate/accelerate their ideas with agility, such as assistance with validation/FDA clearance assessment or other common regulatory hurdles

Success can be measured in many ways - impact on patient care, the boldness of the innovation, value creation for all participants, public perception of the work, and time to market.  Value creation could be licensing, transactional revenue, or equity growth.

Different audiences may have different perceptions of go-lives.    While it would be tempting to conflate general availability (GA) of our Platform offerings with go-live, we believe that the Platform won't be live until an "active customer" or stakeholder actually uses what we have to offer.

With these ideas in mind, here are few straw definitions for the concept of go-live for the Mayo Platform businesses.

 1.  The Clinic Data Analytics Platform (CDAP) accelerates new insight discovery by enabling analysis of de-identified historical data stored within a secure cloud hosted container controlled by Mayo Clinic.     A reasonable definition of go live is that CDAP data and tools become available such that a customer runs a data analysis that yields new insights for that customer, for example discovering a potential path forward for COVID-19 care or treatment (the "active customer" criterion)

2.  The Home Hospital Platform enables high acuity care via telemetry, clinical care coordination, communication, supply chain, and record keeping.   A go-live occurs when a home hospital discharge occurs with a patient restored to health after management facilitated by Platform components hosted on Mayo Clinic Cloud.  (the "active patient" criterion)

3.  The Remote Diagnostic and Management Platform accepts a signal/data via a Mayo hosted orchestration engine, sends it to an algorithm/interpretation service, and a high quality diagnosis/interpretative result is returned to a customer, for which a payment is generated (the "active orchestration" criterion)

4.  We're thinking of developing some supportive functions such as FDA clearance services.  An approved FDA clearance would constitute a go live (the "demonstrated expertise" criterion).     The reason we are considering a standard function for FDA clearance as part of acceleration/incubation services is because of the significant complexity and expense of  FDA clearance:

a.       Regulatory Pathway Determination: $21-23K.  Takes about 2 months to complete
b.       Gap Analysis & QMS Implementation: $220K (800 hrs.) - $495K (1,800 hrs.), depending on results of Gap Analysis (how much needs to be done)
c.       FDA Pre-submission prep & meetings: $98K (354 hrs.)
d.       Complete FDA submission and clearance: $275-400K (1,000-1,200 hrs.)

A service that can pool experience, talent and technology to get synergies and scale to lower the unit cost and speed of FDA clearances would be a win for everyone.

5.   As we create our staffing model, we'll have functions that cross all new Platform businesses and dedicated roles in each business.   For example, across all businesses we'll have one team overseeing the communication plan and one team processing new business ideas/collaboration requests.     If a new proposal can be reviewed, analyzed, a go/no go decision made, and a new business launched, that would constitute a go-live of the function being open for business.    (the "process maturity" criterion)

In 2020, we're aiming for at least one go-live per quarter, celebrating the "ribbon cutting" of objectively measured Platform progress.   Next quarter, we'll launch the CDAP tool for Mayo internal users and begin processing our first queries for external customers.

To me, our most "pure Platform" go-live will be when we have a generalizable model for ingesting data, interpreting it with novel analytics/algorithms/services and returning a result within the workflow of the customer.    It's also one of the most challenging to assemble.    I'll be writing about our journey for that go-live throughout 2020.