The news: Alphabet’s Verily is teaming up with Mayo Clinic to develop a digital clinical support tool that provides docs with the most up-to-date information on cardiovascular disease management care guidelines and treatments.

• Mayo Clinic digital health execs describe the tool as a “GPS for patient care.”

Here’s how it works: Verily will curate clinical content from resources like Mayo Clinic and patient health data in a tool that integrates directly within doctors’ workflows (e.g., their EHRs).

• For example, if a physician is treating a heart failure patient, the tool will populate the patient’s last stroke test and recommend next steps, per Verily.

The opportunity: Clinical decision support tech could reduce the amount of information doctors have to sift through to find the latest recommendations for patients—and Verily and Mayo’s tool edges out some other tools already on the market.

• Clinical decision support tool UptoDate (which is used by two-thirds of US health system doctors) has exhaustive information regarding topics like cardiovascular conditions, but that likely means it takes docs some time to sift through the information to find clinical answers.
• Plus, there’s no one-fits-all solution to treating chronic cardiovascular conditions, which makes the personalization aspect of Verily’s tech appealing to doctors: Most clinical decision support tools offer limited recommendations like flu-shot reminders, for instance.
• That’s likely why players like Verily and IBM are trying to wade deeper into improving the clinical decision support space. For example, IBM touts its AI-powered clinical decision support tools offer clinicians rapid, personalized insights within docs’ EHRs.

Will hospitals actually invest in Verily’s new tool? Verily says it wants to eventually extend its digital clinical support tool to its pre-existing health system partners—a smart bet, considering its clients are larger, digitally mature health systems that are more likely to take on the risk of implementing new tech.

• For example, Verily’s roster of health system clients includes names like Emory and Wake Forest Baptist Health, both of which are massive health systems that historically make room in their budgets for new digital health innovations.
• Emory’s Healthcare Innovation Hub recently announced it’s teaming up with Anthem to create digital health solutions with 5G technology, for instance.