Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation

The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation (CFI), embedded within Mayo Clinic, is one of the United States’s first and largest health care delivery innovation group working within a major academic medical center.

The CFI ^[1] uses design thinking, an innovation discipline used by many U.S. corporations, and human centered design to rapidly develop patient-focused health care delivery models that increase the quality and access to health care and decrease its cost.

Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation fuses design principles with the scientific method to uncover human needs in the health care environment, which include empathy, creativity, systems thinking and a human-centered focus. Design methods include ethnographic and observational techniques, visualization, prototyping, sketching, storytelling, brainstorming and more. The complement of design allows the center to think beyond what it normally does and serve as a translator for ideas and possibilities.

Based in the Mayo Clinic’s main facility in Rochester, MN,^[2] the CFI has more than 50 full-time staff including service designers, project managers, information technology specialists, and clinicians working together to develop health care delivery solutions for Mayo’s Clinic’s 57,000 employees and half a million patients annually in Rochester as well at Mayo Clinic’s branch facilities in Jacksonville, FL ^[3] and Phoenix/Scottsdale, AZ.^[4]

History of the CFI

Formally established as the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation in 2008, the 50+ member multidisciplinary team has grown to be one of the largest among an increasing number of health care innovation centers at U.S. academic and non-profit medical centers.

A precursor to the Center for Innovation, the SPARC Lab,^[5] was created in the Department of Medicine with a staff of two. By 2008, the SPARC Lab had grown to 24 full-time staff and was rechristened as the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.

In its first three years, the CFI completed more than 100 innovation projects within the Mayo system, ranging from redesigning Mayo’s traditional clinical exam room; to streamlining job descriptions and protocols in a dermatology clinic; to analyzing how hospital care teams hand off patients from one team to another; to supporting a project with a “stroke robot” that enables Mayo physicians to consult with patients from a remote location within seconds of the first possible signs of a stroke.

CFI’s Vision and Mission

Dr. John Noseworthy, the president and CEO of Mayo Clinic, describes the CFI as a “lab for creative thinking” at Mayo.^[6] The director of the CFI, Dr. Nicholas LaRusso, says the CFI’s mission is “to transform the experience and delivery of health care. We need a more patient-focused delivery system that creates greater value and better health for the patient. For meaningful change, the medical community must step outside its comfort zone.” ^[7]

Design Thinking

The guiding discipline used by the CFI is design thinking,^[8] an innovation technique used by many U.S. businesses outside of health care to improve customer service and to invent new paradigms of value. The CFI is testing the hypothesis that design thinking, a proven successful innovation discipline in U.S. business and industry, can be successfully applied to health care innovation.^[9]

The CFI’s staff is built around a core of graduates from design schools and designers recruited from design firms and service-oriented companies.

The Outpatient Lab

In its early years, the CFI (then the SPARC Lab) developed the Outpatient Lab, where consenting patients were observed in prototypes of newly designed examination rooms that were altered in size, shape and configuration. These Outpatient Lab studies resulted in a redesign of Mayo Clinic’s basic examination room. In the old room, the exam table was placed in the center of the room, with doctor-patient conversations held at a desk adjacent to the exam table. In the new configuration, doctors and patients chat with each other at a round table in a carpeted room that feels much like a living room, with the examination table, clothes-changing area and medical instruments located in an adjoining room.^[10]

The Design Research Studio

At the CFI’s Design Research Studio, designers and project managers collaborate with Mayo physicians, nurses and care team members to brainstorm and prototype solutions to health care delivery problems.^[11]

Project Management

In 2009, project managers were added to the CFI staff,^[12] partly in recognition that the creative aspect of design thinking sometimes needs a counterbalancing force to keep projects driving towards deadlines, cost and quality control, and defined scope of work.

Always Be There For Me......

The Center for Innovation focuses on four main themes reflecting a Mayo Clinic strategic vision of “To Help Me Be Well, When I Need Care, When I Need to Make a Decision and To Help Me Think and Work Differently”. Each theme is centered on human needs, has a multidisciplinary team, internal and external collaborators, and a diverse portfolio of projects with key metrics all focused on creating new care delivery models helping Mayo Clinic to always be there for patients everywhere.

Internal and External Partners

Partnering with people and organizations inside and outside of health care, and inside and outside of Mayo Clinic, is a core principle of the CFI.^[13] Among Mayo’s external partners are Best Buy, GE Healthcare, IBM, IDEO, Microsoft, Steelcase, Cisco, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, Purdue University, Doblin, Ascension Health, Vital Health and Imaginatik.

Other CFI innovation programs

• Transform, an annual two-day health care innovation conference featuring high-profile guest speakers.^[14]
• The CoDE Project, an annual award granting funds to Mayo Clinic employees for innovative health care proposals.
• Eureka, an online collaboration tool allowing employees across the Mayo Clinic system in Rochester, MN; Scottsdale, AZ; and Jacksonville, Florida to share resources and news and join discussion and work groups.
• The Innovation Curriculum, a series of lunch-time seminars teaching innovation skills and mindset to Mayo employees at all levels.

References

External links

• The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation