Organizations
How companies, institutions, and movements embody the sixteen values.
Mayo Clinic
The patient comes first, and the patient is the most complex case you will ever see
Mayo Clinic built the world’s most referenced medical institution on a model that concentrated mastery in a single place: the most difficult cases, the most specialized physicians, the most rigorous diagnostic process, all organized around the conviction that complexity requires the best available expertise rather than the nearest available provider. William Mayo’s founding insight was that medicine practiced as a team of specialists consulting on each case was categorically superior to medicine practiced as a generalist treating what they could see. The model has not changed in 160 years.
Mayo Clinic
The patient comes first, and the patient is the most complex case you will ever see
Mayo Clinic built the world’s most referenced medical institution on a model that concentrated mastery in a single place: the most difficult cases, the most specialized physicians, the most rigorous diagnostic process, all organized around the conviction that complexity requires the best available expertise rather than the nearest available provider. William Mayo’s founding insight was that medicine practiced as a team of specialists consulting on each case was categorically superior to medicine practiced as a generalist treating what they could see. The model has not changed in 160 years.
Diagnostic accuracy for complex, previously undiagnosed conditions that no other institution matches at volume. A research program integrated into clinical practice in ways that make the latest findings available to patients years before they reach community hospitals. A reputation so strong that patients fly from 130 countries specifically to receive a diagnosis.
A geographic concentration that makes the best-available medicine accessible only to patients with the resources and mobility to reach Rochester, Minnesota. A cost structure that, even with financial assistance programs, places Mayo-level care outside the reach of the patients who most need it. The tension between an institution organized around the most complex cases and the public health reality that most of the burden of disease is carried by the most ordinary conditions.
The development of the multidisciplinary team approach in the 1890s, in which Will and Charlie Mayo began consulting each other and their colleagues on difficult cases rather than treating them individually - inventing the model that all major medical centers now follow.