Deloitte Insights delivers proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

DELOITTE INSIGHTS

  • Home
  • Spotlight
    • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
    • Top 10 Reading Guide
    • Fostering Well-Being
    • Cyber Risk
    • Resilience
  • Topics
    • Strategy
    • Economy & Society
    • Operations
    • Workforce
    • Technology
  • Industries
    • Consumer
    • Energy, Resources, & Industrials
    • Financial Services
    • Government & Public Services
    • Life Sciences & Health Care
    • Technology, Media & Telecom
  • More from Deloitte Insights
    • About
    • Deloitte Insights Magazine
    • Press Room Podcasts
Deloitte.com
Deloitte Insights logo
  • SPOTLIGHT
    • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
    • Top 10 Reading Guide
    • Fostering Well-Being
    • Cyber Risk
    • Resilience
  • TOPICS
    • Strategy
    • Economy & Society
    • Operations
    • Workforce
    • Technology
  • INDUSTRIES
    • Consumer
    • Energy, Resources, & Industrials
    • Financial Services
    • Government & Public Services
    • Life Sciences & Health Care
    • Technology, Media & Telecom
  • MORE FROM DELOITTE INSIGHTS
    • About
    • Deloitte Insights Magazine
    • Press Room Podcasts
  • Welcome!

    For personalized content and settings, go to you My Deloitte Dashboard

    Latest Insights

    In a competitive labor market for retail workers, sustainability programs could give employers an edge

    Article
     • 
    5-min read

    A framework for managing an extended and connected workforce

    Article
     • 
    2-min read

    Recommendations

    Government Trends 2023

    Article

    Navigating toward a new normal: 2023 Deloitte corporate travel study

    Article
     • 
    17-min read

    About Deloitte Insights

    About Deloitte Insights

    Deloitte Insights Magazine, Issue 31

    Magazine

    Press Room Podcasts

    Podcasts

    Topics for you

    • Business Strategy & Growth
    • Leadership
    • Operations
    • Marketing & Sales
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Emerging Technologies
    • Economy

    Watch & Listen

    Dbriefs

    Stay informed on the issues impacting your business with Deloitte's live webcast series. Gain valuable insights and practical knowledge from our specialists while earning CPE credits.

    Deloitte Insights Podcasts

    Join host Tanya Ott as she interviews influential voices discussing the business trends and challenges that matter most to your business today. 

    Subscribe

    Deloitte Insights Newsletters

    Looking to stay on top of the latest news and trends? With MyDeloitte you'll never miss out on the information you need to lead. Simply link your email or social profile and select the newsletters and alerts that matter most to you.

Welcome back

Still not a member? Join My Deloitte

Mayo Clinic

by Kelly Cheng
  • Save for later
  • Download
  • Share
    • Share on Facebook
    • Share on Twitter
    • Share on Linkedin
    • Share by email
19 June 2013

Mayo Clinic A case study in work environment redesign

20 June 2013
  • Kelly Cheng
  • Save for later
  • Download
  • Share
    • Share on Facebook
    • Share on Twitter
    • Share on Linkedin
    • Share by email

Mayo Clinic supports its collaborative culture with social collaboration software and physical innovation spaces to improve performance.

Can the way the workplace is constructed—physically, virtually, and managerially—affect employee performance? The Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge report Work environment redesign, based on a study of more than 75 organizations, argues that the work environment can have a critical impact on employee productivity, passion, and innovation. The study outlines nine design principles that can help employers gain more value from their people.

This case study explores ways that Mayo Clinic is applying these design principles to enhance its own corporate environment.

Hex Infographic_Mayo Clinic

Figure 1. Work environment design principles used at Mayo Clinic

Company background and results

Heads of state and common citizens alike travel to Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit medical practice and medical research group, because of its high-quality medical treatment. The clinic has achieved top rankings on the US News & World Report list of “US News best hospitals” every year for the last two decades.1 Two of its hospitals in Rochester and Phoenix were recognized by Healthgrades, an online information portal, with a 2013 Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence.2 Mayo constantly finds new ways to improve its performance, relying on innovative methods to connect its staff and patients to the right experts and information while helping these parties learn quickly from one another. Ranked on Fortune magazine’s “100 best companies to work for” list for the last nine years,3 Mayo Clinic’s collaborative culture translates into significant results.

Relevant connections

Mayo Clinic’s tradition of teamwork and learning is supported by a strong technological infrastructure. Through a mobile and tablet app called AskMayoExpert (see figure 2),4 physicians can access content personalized to their specific situation. In addition to clinical knowledge, including guidelines and resources, the content includes contact information for the most relevant specialists and groups within Mayo Clinic. Specialists are assigned based on subspecialty, and all questions and answers in AskMayoExpert are tagged at multiple levels. Question categories include diagnosis, prevention, treatment, cause, indication for referral, or further follow-up. Answers can be tagged as care process model, FAQ, key fact, quality measure, location, and area of interest (adult versus pediatric, diagnostic versus therapeutic, and so on). Finally, users are able to comment within topics. For issues regarding specific patients, the app provides contact information for a relevant expert.5 Users frequently decide to connect with others through this system. As Dr. Rick Ishimura, cardiologist and AskMayoExpert project lead, described to Star Tribune in late 2010: “Out of the 2,500 physicians we have at Mayo Rochester, about 1,200 have started to use it. Many people use it 10 to 12 times a day. About two-thirds of them find an answer immediately and about a third will go on to contact the experts in the area.”6

Mayo’s collaborative culture and technology allow doctors to make relevant connections. In Leonard Berry’s The Collaborative Organization, Dr. Keith Kelly relates a story about a junior surgeon who, shortly after joining the staff, was paged by one of his most experienced colleagues for advice. Although startled by the request, the junior surgeon realized that this collaborative problem-solving would help the staff provide the most effective operating options for the patient. Thanks to Mayo’s unique style of teamwork, the patient recovered successfully. The junior surgeon realized that even the most senior surgeons needed connections and assistance from all areas of the organization.7

Smart capture and share

Mayo Clinic encourages home-grown smart capture and share technologies to enhance its collaborative culture. For example, Mayo Clinic’s patient scheduling system, after instantly synthesizing patient availability, travel time, and other important prerequisites to treatment, assigns appropriate physicians and appointments. Once the patient arrives at an appointment, all preceding patient interactions, lab, and exam results are shared with the next clinician in the sequence. With all of this data automatically uploaded and algorithmically processed, the average wait time for an appointment in one department decreased from 45 days to 2 days. Similar efforts remain top priorities as the organization continues to expand to new locations.8

In addition, automatic archiving of in-depth problem-solving is cited as a major benefit to staff. For example, if someone at Mayo Clinic is looking at different vendors and deciding which option to select, research and conversations with vendors as well as individual meeting notes and associated outcomes can be made easily accessible through Mayo Clinic’s social collaboration platform. Without such a system, the information collected would be as temporary as an employee’s notebook; if a similar question surfaces again, the next employee might have to repeat the same process without the pertinent background information. Fortunately, Mayo Clinic’s social collaboration tool allows for archiving and tagging that reduces these duplicative efforts.

Rapid experimentation and real-time feedback and reflection

Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation is one of the first and the largest to be integrated into medical practice. In the center’s outpatient lab, Mayo Clinic hosts outpatient visits in which patients and physicians try out new processes and physical layouts, including reconfigured floor plans. Because patients may have trouble describing specific issues, the simulation is observed by industrial engineers, who can observe a patient’s subtle reactions and provide real-time feedback to the Mayo Clinic team about what went well and what could be improved. The outpatient lab enables rapid experimentation that helps new processes and designs make their way into the patient experience. The emphasis on speed and innovation has led to improvements at Mayo Clinic. For example, prototyping teams tested the idea of self-service check-in kiosks by quickly crafting cardboard and paper kiosks. Patients responded positively, leading to prototypes that rapidly improved with each round of user feedback.9

Figure 2_Mayo Clinic

Figure 2. AskMayoExpert

Real-time feedback is also facilitated through social networks. According to Dr. Ferris Timimi at the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media, social collaboration software may reflect the most effective tool for real-time engagement at present.10 Questions that previously took hours to answer via email can be resolved within minutes by crowdsourced feedback on social collaboration software. Clinicians rely on social networking most when they need to work with other project members separated by geography and time. For example, to integrate their practice, which was spread across multiple floors, Mayo Clinic’s transplant coordination staff implemented a social collaboration software group in 2009. Using social collaboration software, the group is able to address real-time practice issues and opportunities and has been able to spread across two separate Mayo Clinic locations.

Lessons learned

  • Instant access to specialists encourages frequent collaboration.
  • Communicating valuable information first requires a culture of teamwork that can then be augmented by technology.
  • By creating an experimentation center and embracing rapid prototyping techniques, companies can obtain valuable feedback on service or process changes.
Credits

Written by: Kelly Cheng

Cover image by: Igor Morski

Endnotes
    1. “Mayo Clinic Rankings,” USNews Health, http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/mn/mayo-foundation-661MAYO/rankings, accessed December 2012. View in article
    2.  “Healthgrades Hospital Quality Clinical Excellence Report 2013,” Healthgrades, 2013, pp. 5-9, http://hg-article-center.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ec/58/8e7ef04b4498bad6b39785105bcc/2013-healthgrades-hospital-quality-methodology, accessed January 2013. View in article
    3. “100 best companies to work for,” CNNMoney, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/best-companies/2012/snapshots/71.html, accessed January 2013. View in article
    4. iTunes Preview, “AskMayoExpert,” https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/askmayoexpert/id551135481?mt=8, accessed December 2012. View in article
    5. Farris Timimi (medical director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media), email interview, January 2013. View in article
    6. Chen May Yee, “Sharing expertise to serve patients,” Star Tribune, January 8, 2011, http://www.startribune.com/business/113080084.html?refer=y, accessed December 2012. View in article
    7. Leonard Berry, “The collaborative organization: Leadership lessons from Mayo Clinic,” Organizational Dynamics, June 2004, pp. 228–242. View in article
    8. Douglas McCarthy, Kimberly Mueller, and Jennifer Wrenn, Mayo Clinic: Multidisciplinary teamwork, physician-led governance, and patient-centered culture, The Commonwealth Fund, August 2009, http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Case%20Study/2009/Aug/1306_McCarthy_Mayo_case%20study.pdf, accessed December 2012. View in article
    9. Mayo Clinic, “Center for Innovation,” http://www.mayo.edu/center-for-innovation/what-we-do/the-center-for-innovation, accessed January 2013; The SPARC innovation program at Mayo Clinic, Mayo Clinic, 2007, http://nexus.som.yale.edu/design-mayo/sites/nexus.som.yale.edu.design-mayo/files/imce_imagepool/Sparc%20Development%20Brochure.pdf, accessed December 2012. View in article
    10. Timimi interview. View in article
Show moreShow less

Topics in this article

Workplace culture

Deloitte Consulting

Learn more
Download Subscribe

Related

img Trending

Interactive 3 days ago

Share article highlights

See something interesting? Simply select text and choose how to share it:

Email a customized link that shows your highlighted text.
Copy a customized link that shows your highlighted text.
Copy your highlighted text.

Mayo Clinic has been saved

Mayo Clinic has been removed

An Article Titled Mayo Clinic already exists in Saved items

 
Forgot password

To stay logged in, change your functional cookie settings.

OR

Social login not available on Microsoft Edge browser at this time.

Connect Accounts

Connect your social accounts

This is the first time you have logged in with a social network.

You have previously logged in with a different account. To link your accounts, please re-authenticate.

Log in with an existing social network:

To connect with your existing account, please enter your password:

OR

Log in with an existing site account:

To connect with your existing account, please enter your password:

Forgot password

Subscribe

to receive more business insights, analysis, and perspectives from Deloitte Insights
✓ Link copied to clipboard

Deloitte Insights delivers proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

Deloitte Insights

  • Home
  • Topics
  • Industries
  • About Deloitte Insights

Spotlight

  • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
  • Top 10 Reading Guide
  • Fostering Well-Being
  • Cyber Risk
  • Resilience
Deloitte logo

Learn about Deloitte’s offerings, people, and culture as a global provider of audit, assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services.

  • Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Cookies
  • Avature Privacy