The Year Ahead

Mayo Clinic is committed to providing the highest-quality medical care. Our mission -- to provide the best care to every patient every day through integrated clinical practice, education and research -- captures what the organization has stood for throughout its history. The patient is the focus of everything we do.

Four organizational priorities in 2007 are aimed at ensuring that our patient focus permeates the entire organization, in every department at every location. Mayo Clinic will focus significant effort on improving its ability to:

1. Connect as a unified organization with multiple locations so that wherever patients are seen, they have the same experience and know that they have access to all of Mayo Clinic's resources.
   
2. Build its culture of teamwork and quality across the institution, so that every practice is examined to ensure that it contributes the highest-quality care and service.
   
3. Search for answers for every patient through individualized medicine so that Mayo can better understand disease differences at the genetic level, enabling Mayo to personalize treatments more effectively.
   
4. Transform the science of health care delivery by improving and sharing what it has learned for the benefit of the entire organization and all of medicine.
   

Working as one

Mayo Clinic is one organization with multiple locations. No matter where patients are seen, they should experience Mayo's model of care -- the highest-quality care and personal service -- and know that they have access to all of the resources of Mayo Clinic.

Inside the organization, Mayo is motivated by common goals and values, with staff at all locations dedicated to working together for our patients. Historically, Mayo Clinic has excelled at bringing together teams of specialists to diagnose and treat the most difficult medical conditions. Today, with specialists in virtually every medical specialty committed to collaboration, and connected through common goals and the latest technology, Mayo has resources unmatched by any other medical institution.

Culture of teamwork and quality

Mayo Clinic has always been synonymous with quality. As an organization, Mayo has a culture of teamwork and quality that allows it to pursue excellence in patient care, to make important discoveries and apply the latest medical knowledge, and to provide great service.

The challenge today is to build on advances in teamwork and quality to create lasting improvements, spread throughout the organization, that deliver the best outcomes, the safest medical care, and the best in service. Delivering the best outcomes in the most efficient and cost-effective manner creates the best value in medical care.

Individualized medicine

Modern medicine has made great strides in linking clinical and biological data to improve our ability to predict an individual's susceptibility to disease, onset and progression of disease, and likely response to therapies.

In the coming years, even more will be possible by taking advantage of the rapidly increasing understanding of our genetic makeup, and developing more sophisticated information systems and tools to allow Mayo Clinic to predict better outcomes.

Science of health care delivery

Mayo Clinic is poised to transform medicine in the 21st century. As the Mayo practice developed, it built on excellent care for patients with a unified patient record, advanced communications and scheduling systems, and facilities designed to support and strengthen the practice of Mayo staff.

Mayo is creating the future of patient care by continuing to apply expertise not only to episodes of care but to the systems and processes that support the delivery of care. The goal is to improve the quality of our care, to improve the safety of our care, and to improve service we provide to patients. Mayo Clinic brings science to health care delivery through the study and application of process improvement and systems engineering principles, increasing the value of the care we deliver.