AskMayoExpert

TAKEAWAY: ASKMAYOEXPERT

NOSEWORTHY:
At Mayo, we took a different path and decided during this merger and acquisition growth in the country—we decided that that wasn’t going to work for us for two reasons. One, we thought if we put the Mayo Clinic name on a lot of places that weren’t Mayo Clinic, then essentially Mayo Clinic disappears, because people go to the Mayo Clinic expecting something, and that’s why they’re making that choice.

Instead, what we said—our biggest impact could be how do we help other hospitals get integrated answers quickly? So we decided to digitize our knowledge. So essentially—I’ll just look at the head table here—there’s a heart surgeon, a cardiologist, infectious disease, a pediatrician, and a psychiatrist—they’re all together, and they say here are the problems that Mayo solves. How do we solve that? Because over here, there’s a health care system where the neurosurgeons and the neurologists and the radiologists don’t really work well together.

So we said let’s create something called AskMayoExpert, which is several thousand medical situations, and get Mayo to weigh in and said—so if I’m a doctor in, I’ll say, Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut, who just happens to be part of our system, and I can’t solve this problem with recurrent kidney stones in this young person and I’ve tried everything, what would Mayo do? And the pediatricians and the calcium people and the kidney doctors at Mayo have said, well, in that situation, here are the next three things that you might consider doing. Here are the folks who wrote that. And if that’s not good enough, give us a call or we’ll do an e-consult—an electronic consult—or whatever.

So we said if we took Mayo’s knowledge, because we’re an integrated group, and how do we work, and then use that as a product to give to others—not give, to have a subscription service to other hospitals—they could be part of what we call the Mayo Clinic Care Network. That’s turned out to be a very successful—we said our knowledge will integrate health care in a group where they’re not integrated. So we’re in, I think, 46 centers worldwide, seven countries, and it’s basically a subscription service.