Rochester, Minnesota. — To address the potentially complex needs of patients after prostate cancer treatment and to provide the necessary precision and care during follow-up, the Department of Radiation Oncology at Mayo Clinic has developed the 'PSA Control Tower.' Traditionally, follow-up for prostate cancer patients is conducted on a standard schedule and depends on manual review of results. Each PSA test is important, but detecting early signs of recurrence requires regular contact and continuous monitoring. As the number of patients increases and care becomes more complex, this process can become difficult to manage. For this reason, many patients require faster interventions and more personalized care. Healthcare systems face growing pressure to provide reliable follow-up without overburdening care teams. The 'PSA Control Tower' integrates clinical information and PSA trends, using smart tools to help care teams identify which patients may need attention and when. Thanks to the technology of the Mayo Clinic Platform, clinicians can easily visualize PSA trends and recurrence risk through intuitive and clear dashboards, providing timely information for conducting well-founded conversations and offering personalized care, while maintaining clinical expertise and a human-centered approach as central elements. 'Our hope is that the PSA Control Tower will represent an unusual triple benefit for patients, physicians, and hospital systems,' says Mark Waddle, M.D. 'The 'Control Tower' will allow each and every patient to be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the peace of mind that follow-up is being done according to clinical guidelines and that abnormal PSA values receive the necessary attention.' Internally, the PSA Control Tower is built on the Mayo Clinic Platform, a secure infrastructure that allows Mayo Clinic staff to access large sets of anonymized patient data. This is a smart monitoring tool designed to help clinicians maintain close and continuous monitoring of patients after treatment. Through this, teams can study patterns over time and build predictive models using information from laboratory results, clinical notes, imaging studies, as well as pathology reports. As new data is progressively incorporated, the predictive models evolve and increase their accuracy. 'This allows our professionals to care for more new patients, treat more complex cases, and focus prostate cancer follow-up efforts on those patients who truly need their time and expertise,' says Dr. Waddle. As this model expands beyond Mayo Clinic, it paves the way for earlier detection, more efficient workflows, and a scalable, data-driven approach to prostate cancer follow-up at a national level.
