Mayo Clinic

Introduction

Mayo Clinic specializes in hard-to-treat diseases, and is well-renowned for innovative and effective treatments for diseases that had gone undiagnosed or under-treated in the same patients with other doctors. Mayo Clinic is known for being at the near the top of most all accredited quality standard listings.

Company Biography

Mayo Clinic is a not-for-profit organization and an internationally renowned medical practice and medical research group located in 3 metropolis areas: Rochester, Minnesota, Scottsdale/ Phoenix, Arizona, and Jacksonville, Florida, along with Mayo Clinic Hospitals and some satellite healthcare and research facilities in and near those cities (such as a few nearby satellite primary healthcare facilities). It is an integral part of the larger Mayo Health System of clinics, hospitals and medical research facilities and schools consisting of Mayo Clinic, Mayo Medical School, the Mayo Graduate School, the Mayo School of Graduate Medical Education, and several other health science Mayo Clinic partners with a number of smaller clinics and hospitals in Minnesota, Iowa, Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin. For example, it has been near the top of the US News and World Report of Best Hospitals for 20 years(Nelson & Quick 11). It accomplishes high medical quality through values such as "The needs of the patient always come first", by coordinating the efforts of its entire group of doctors, and by devoting over 40% of its resources towards research (rather than just medical practice).

The clinic started as a single, small outpatient facility, and later became America's first integrated group practice, a model that is now standard in the United States. However, Mayo Clinic integrates the practice of over 1,700 medical doctors, making it much larger than the typical group practice of 3 to 100 doctors.

Since about the year 2000, Mayo Clinic has also become renowned for achieving high quality at low cost. One extensive study found that the cost paid by insurers to treat Medicare patients in their last 3 years of life (the most expensive years), was only 54% of comparable costs in nearby clinics and hospitals. Mayo Clinic has been researched and presented many times during the passing of the 2009 healthcare reform bills in US Congress as a model to reduce healthcare costs while increasing quality for the nation. However, Mayo Clinic has answered the 2009 healthcare reform bills with an open letter stating that these bills as written will not reduce costs or increase quality nationwide(www.mayoclinic.org).

Mayo Clinic pays medical doctors a fixed salary that is unaffected by patient volume. This practice is thought to decrease the monetary motivation to see patients in large numbers and increase the incentive to spend more time with individuals. Salaries are determined by the marketplace salaries for physicians in comparable large group practices.

Why this Company Interests Me

In 2009, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, was ranked as the #2 overall hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. A total of 4,861 hospitals were considered and ranked in 16 specialties from cancer and heart disease to respiratory disorders and urology; 174, or less than 4 ...