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Mayo Clinic displays steadfast commitment to patient care, referral relations, and health care quality through institutional examples of unique, value-add endeavors that are under way with the Mayo Clinic Patient Experience Subcommittee and the Referring Physician Office. In this article, we share the Mayo Model of Care and patient stories that embody the 8 Mayo Clinic values of respect, compassion, integrity, healing, teamwork, excellence, innovation, and stewardship. The Mayo founders imparted to their staff the passion for patient care by encouraging a fair and just culture for its employees. This culture allows the creation, maintenance, and improvement of clinical care, research studies, and educational curricula, which in turn propagate the mission–“To inspire hope and contribute to health and well-being by providing the best care to every patient through integrated clinical practice, education, and research.”

AbstractIntroductionThe pace of medical discovery is accelerating to the point where caregivers can no longer keep up with the latest diagnosis or treatment recommendations. At the same time, sophisticated and complex electronic medical records and clinical systems are generating increasing volumes of patient data, making it difficult to find the important information required for patient care. To address these challenges, Mayo Clinic established a knowledge management program to curate, store, and disseminate clinical knowledge.MethodsThe authors describe AskMayoExpert, a point‐of‐care knowledge delivery system, and discuss the process by which the clinical knowledge is captured, vetted by clinicians, annotated, and stored in a knowledge content management system. The content generated for AskMayoExpert is considered to be core clinical content and serves as the basis for knowledge diffusion to clinicians through order sets and clinical decision support rules, as well as to patients and consumers through patient education materials and internet content. The authors evaluate alternative approaches for better integration of knowledge into the clinical workflow through development of computer‐interpretable care process models.ResultsEach of the modeling approaches evaluated has shown promise. However, because each of them addresses the problem from a different perspective, there have been challenges in coming to a common model. Given the current state of guideline modeling and the need for a near‐term solution, Mayo Clinic will likely focus on breaking down care process models into components and on standardization of those components, deferring, for now, the orchestration.ConclusionA point‐of‐care knowledge resource developed to support an individualized approach to patient care has grown into a formal knowledge management program. Translation of the textual knowledge into machine executable knowledge will allow integration of the knowledge with specific patient data and truly serve as a colleague and mentor for the physicians taking care of the patient.

Interferon β-1b (Betaseron) has been shown in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to reduce relapse rate, relapse severity and MRI progression in patients with relapsing-remitting MS. The recently published Betaseron extension trial and studies from the National Institutes of Health provide additional evidence suggesting an important treatment effect The major new findings from these studies are reviewed in this paper. Other findings from these recent studies merit attention, however. Specifically, neutralizing antibody formation was seen in 38% of patients receiving high-dose Betaseron at 3 years. With the development of these antibodies, there was no longer clinical evidence that the drug remained effective. This observation must be considered carefully when initiating Betaseron therapy. The Betaseron trial suggests that MRI is an imperfect predictor of clinical disease activity. Of particular interest was the finding that patients receiving low-dose Betaseron developed ‘confirmed treatment failure’ sooner than placebo-treated patients, despite a clear treatment benefit on MRI-detected evidence of subclinical disease activity.

Background: It is unclear if all patients with relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) ultimately develop progressive MS. Onset of progressive disease course seems to be age- rather than disease duration-dependent. Some forms of progressive MS (e.g. primary progressive MS (PPMS)) are uncommon in population-based studies. Ascertainment of patients with PPMS from clinic-based populations can facilitate a powerful comparison of age at progression onset between secondary progressive MS (SPMS) and PPMS but may introduce unclear biases. Objective: Our aim is to confirm that onset of progressive disease course is more relevant to the patient’s age than the presence or duration of a pre-progression relapsing disease course in MS. Methods: We studied a population-based MS cohort ( n =210, RRMS n =109, progressive MS n =101) and a clinic-based progressive MS cohort ( n =754). Progressive course was classified as primary (PPMS; n =322), single attack (SAPMS; n =112) and secondary progressive (SPMS; n =421). We studied demographics (chi 2 or t -test), age-of-progression-onset ( t -test) and time to Expanded Disability Status Scale of 6 (EDSS6) (Kaplan–Meier analyses). Results: Sex ratio ( p =0.58), age at progression onset ( p =0.37) and time to EDSS6 ( p =0.16) did not differ between the cohorts. Progression had developed before age 75 in 99% of patients with known progressive disease course; 38% with RRMS did not develop progression by age 75. Age at progression onset did not differ between SPMS (44.9±9.6), SAPMS (45.5±9.6) and PPMS (45.7±10.8). In either cohort, only 2% of patients had reached EDSS6 before onset of progression. Conclusions: Patients with RRMS do not inevitably develop a progressive disease course. Onset of progression is more dependent on age than the presence or duration of a pre-progression symptomatic disease course. Moderate disability is sustained predominantly after the onset of a progressive disease course in MS.