Mercy entered into a research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies to support medical device safety, the St. Louis-based health system confirmed July 2.
Mercy developed a platform that uses real-world clinical data from its Epic EHR to evaluate medical device performance. Under the collaboration, J&J will use this data infrastructure to inform regulatory decision-making and patient outcomes associated with its medical devices.
"We began this project to make sure the devices Mercy uses work for patients," Joseph Drozda, MD, director of outcomes research at Mercy, said in the health system's July 2 statement.
Mercy's collaboration with J&J follows a similar medical device partnership the health system maintains with Medtronic. In October 2017, Mercy and Medtronic unveiled plans to share clinical data gathered during routine patient care to gain insight into medical device safety and outcomes.
In the July 2 statement, Dr. Drozda suggested these collaborations will become more common as the FDA continues to encourage the use of post-market data to assess product safety.
"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," Dr. Drozda said. "That's critical where patient outcomes are concerned."