Mayo Clinic’s overarching Bold.Forward 2030 plan calls for innovative strategies to cure, connect, and transform the current practice, education, and research globally and extend the reach beyond our physical campuses using new technology to help our patients in new ways previously thought unimaginable.

Mayo Clinic’s STR-X Fellowship provides an incredible, cutting-edge, immersive education in these new technologies to provide an unparalleled experiential learning experience and train the next generation of physician-innovator-scientists in creating new solutions to reach patients around the globe at home and in rural, underserved areas.

The primary purpose of the STR-X Fellowship is focused on solving unmet patient care needs using innovative technology that helps test ways to address remote/rural, and underserved areas of the globe and that scales in the future.

The STR-X curriculum is a catalyst that provides advanced training to accelerate medical-surgical training beyond contemporary residency training by providing a broad technological canvas to train the next generation of physician leaders to solve global health care challenges at scale.

Background

There is a global need to expand the use of telemedicine services among multiple medical and surgical specialties and bridge the gap from dense urban populations subspecialists to rural and underserved areas of the United States and across the globe^1–3. A new field is emerging that combines the technologies of simulation, telemedicine, haptics, and robotics that can locally triage and start life-saving therapies earlier and improve long-term outcomes⁴.

Simulation is a robust platform for enhancing learner education and adopted from the military and aviation industry in health care given evidence demonstrating major improvements in safety and quality^5,6. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call for global telemedicine services and the need to balance the supply and demand mismatch between high-demand subspecialties to underserved areas of the U.S. and globe^2,7. Telemedicine allows for earlier identification and earlier activation of systems of care outcomes including improved outcomes and reduced costs⁸. The emergence of telerobotics in health care is occurring rapidly due to rapidly evolving telecommunications technology (e.g., 5G) to enhance telemedicine with robotics⁴.

Since 2018, Mayo Clinic has performed several cutting-edge STR-X feasibility pilots and now seeks to formalize this training using combinatorial technologies for a first-of-its-kind training program to train the next generation of physicians and health care staff using this technology.