About SIRIS

Patient preparation

What SIRIS helps you do

SIRIS supports visit preparation. It does not diagnose, give medical advice, determine surgical candidacy, or replace your care team.

• Prepare for surgery-related conversations

  Understand education topics before a visit so conversations with the care team can be more focused.

• Review general surgical education

  Explore preparation, recovery, warning symptoms, and care-team question topics from patient education materials.

• Save questions for the care team

  Save questions from chat or build your own list of topics to bring to a surgical visit.

• Export visit-preparation notes

  Export saved questions and Saved Q&A into a clean visit-preparation summary.

Where answers come from

The sources behind an answer

SIRIS is designed to generate answers grounded in the knowledge sources selected for that conversation, and it shows you which sources were searched.

• Approved knowledge sources

  SIRIS can search approved knowledge sources available through Mayo Clinic IRIS. The default patient-education set is the Patient Education Library, the Health Information Library, and AskMayoExpert. Additional available sources, including published medical literature, can be selected from the Sources menu.

• Curated specialty collections

  A surgical field may also have its own collection of education documents, provided by that department and stored in IRIS. When a collection is available, it can hold guidance specific to how a team practices that general libraries may not describe.

Specialty collections use an IRIS capability called Bring Your Own Data, which lets a department add its own documents to what IRIS can search. Breast Reconstruction is the first SIRIS surgical field being prepared this way; the collection is not yet in use. Three things are worth knowing about how collections work:

• You decide whether it is used

  When a reviewed collection is enabled for a surgical field, it appears in the Sources menu as its own checkbox. Turn it on or off for any conversation — SIRIS lists the sources it searched on the same screen, and you can see which documents the collection contains before deciding.

• Educational material only

  A collection is intended only for approved educational material provided by the surgical team. Patient records are not permitted in a curated specialty collection, and no one can upload files through this website.

• Content review comes first

  A collection is only enabled for patients after its documents have completed the applicable content review and answers drawn from them have been compared against the standard sources. Until a document has, it is not listed and not used — the Sources menu shows the documents that have completed review, each with its version, the clinical team that provided it, and when it was last reviewed.

A specialty collection supplements the knowledge sources above; it never replaces them, and it does not change what SIRIS is. Answers remain educational information rather than medical advice, and your surgical team remains the right place for decisions about your care.

People behind SIRIS

Team

SIRIS is supported by surgical education, platform development, IRIS/API, research, and user experience collaborators.