Our highly skilled pediatric surgeons in the Division of Pediatric Surgery describe their collaborative approach to communicating with referring providers, including care coordination and timely feedback.

The best reason to refer a patient to Mayo Clinic, in particular the Children's Center and the division of Pediatric Surgery, is that we really would like to coordinate care with that home provider. Those referring providers really need to be incorporated into the treatment team. We need to communicate back and forth to each other and really get the patient back to their normal life so that they can go to school and be happy and healthy and be taken care of by their local provider.

The pediatric surgery group here makes an effort to ensure that you get timely feedback as to what the plans are and what our recommendations are. We try to do as much care at home as possible because it is a challenge for families whose parents are, are, family members are working. They simply cannot take that much time off and away. So we try to make sure that transition to us and back to a home is well done. Because we know that when that coordination happens, the outcomes for the patient are better.

Rare is rare. But when you're at a large medical center like Mayo Clinic, we tend to see these things more frequently and we do have expertise in areas that are very, very uncommon.

And we will assemble as big of a team as we need and pull in resources from wherever we need to help them reach a diagnosis and then to give them the treatment that's needed.

The thing that really excites me is the number of experts that we have within the Children's Hospital. That starts with obviously for us pediatric surgery, but it goes to the medical specialties: Radiology, interventional radiologists, oncologic specialists, and how well we work together and integrate the care for a patient that's referred to us. And it really is a collaboration every day.

We see patients only in a fraction of their lifetime and we see them when they are sick. But their home physicians have known them and probably their families their entire lives. And so I just feel very fortunate to be a part of that, and when patients and their physicians put their trust in us to join their care team.