SIRIS

Surgical-IRIS Education

AI-powered surgical patient education built on Mayo Clinic's IRIS platform.

The Problem

What is broken clinically?

Patients scheduled for bariatric surgery receive a preparation packet and a brief consultation — but the information gap between booking and operation is substantial. Studies show patients retain less than 40% of clinician-provided pre-operative education. Poor preparation correlates with higher peri-operative anxiety, lower compliance with pre-surgical dietary protocols, and reduced long-term success rates.

Clinical Need

Why this matters in surgery

AI-powered patient education can personalise content to a patient's specific procedure, comorbidities, and literacy level — something a static pamphlet cannot do. By integrating with the IRIS platform (Mayo Clinic's clinical AI infrastructure), SIRIS can surface institutional resources and answer procedure-specific questions with guardrails that prevent medical misadvice.

Data Sources

Where the data comes from

SIRIS operates on Mayo Clinic's patient-facing education corpus (IRIS platform) plus a curated surgical procedure knowledge base. No identifiable patient data is retained by the system. Conversation logs (de-identified) inform prompt safety and accuracy audits.

Methods

Technical approach

SIRIS is a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system built on Mayo Clinic's IRIS platform. Patients interact via a chat interface. The system routes queries through a surgical-procedure-specific context layer, retrieves relevant Mayo Clinic patient education articles, and generates responses calibrated to reading level and clinical safety boundaries. Hard stops prevent the system from providing diagnostic, dosing, or post-surgical complication guidance.

Validation Plan

How the claims will be tested

Validation Plan

Content coming soon.

Current Status

What stage we're at

SIRIS is deployed and accessible via a public URL. The platform processes live patient queries. A user-satisfaction and information-retention study is in design phase. The patient education paper describing SIRIS was published in Surgical Endoscopy (2026).

Model Card

Intended use, readiness, and limitations

A-STAR model card

SIRIS

Surgical-IRIS Education

Intended use: Patient-facing education support for bariatric surgery preparation, question generation, and resource navigation.
Clinical phase: Patient journey and education
Input data: Natural language patient questions
Procedure context
Curated Mayo Clinic education resources
Output: Educational response
Relevant resource links
Suggested follow-up questions for the care team
Model/pipeline: Retrieval-augmented education workflow built around Mayo Clinic IRIS resources and surgical scope guardrails.
Validation status: Deployed with formal clinical evaluation and user-satisfaction study design in progress.
Deployment readiness: Public education deployment. Not a diagnostic tool and not a replacement for clinician consultation.
Limitations: Current scope is bariatric surgery education, English-language interactions, and non-urgent preparation questions.