Mayo Clinic Healthcare Marketing, Research Paper Example

With over 3,800 physicians and scientists and a total employment of staff including nurses, students and allied help staff of 58,000, the Mayo Clinic is world renowned for their quality standards and commitment to excellence (Mayo 2011).  The focus on how marketing for the Mayo Clinic is accomplished in multiple parts.  The first part is the heritage and lineage of the Mayo Clinic.  The second is the service and exceptional expertise that is afforded at the clinic.  Lastly is the focus on the amount of research that is conducted at the Mayo Clinic and how it impacts the ability for them to serve their patients and provide not only the patients at their clinic the benefits but their research has a global impact.

The Mayo Clinic is a not-for-profit organization.  This means that while the Mayo Clinic can generate surplus funds they must use those funds for self-preservation as opposed to paying dividends to shareholders.  This self-preservation allows upwards of 40% of the resources to be allocated to research rather than the practice of medicine.  Located in multiple locations in Rochester, Minnesota, Phoenix, Arizona and Jacksonville, Florida the clinic serves over 70 different communities and care for over one million people per year (May 2011).  The Mayo Clinic also owns the Mayo Clinic Health System which allows the Mayo Clinic to extend its brand and services across upwards of seventy hospitals.

There are three core values held by the Mayo Clinic and those core values drive how the business runs.  The first is patient care.  The care of the patient is paramount and in order to ensure the time and attention is paid to each and every patient each physician is paid a fixed salary that is not linked in any way to the amount of patients they see or treat.  The theory behind this motivating catalyst is that if financial gain is taken out of the patient care equation the physician will spend more time treating the patient and less time focusing on quantity of patients to meet a quota or a personal financial objective.  The next value lies in the roots of research.  The basis of understanding disease, building the best clinical practices and moving the results of scientific experiment to the real world are all focuses based on their research values.  Each section is a portion of the path to facilitate patient care.  The last core value of the Mayo Clinic is education.  Continued education as well as educating others have been instilled in the culture of the Mayo Clinic since it opened its doors in 1917.  The focus was so much though it started its own medical school in 1972 and continued to make contributions to the medical field.

The demographic of who most utilizes the services of the Mayo Clinic fall into the 50-64 year old range and are normally within 120-500 miles of the facility (JCEM 1998).  There are approximately an even split between male and female patients as well as a close 51% of those being minority.  The largest differentiator between the Mayo Clinic and other medical facilities is the amount of out-of-state participation they received due to their vast knowledge and expertise in very specific and specialized health care solutions.  Approximately 78% of the patients are from out of state in relation to the clinic they are visiting.

This type of market, in which there is an even distribution regarding male and female and for the most part the minority of 51% of patients, bring up questions on where a focus can be and how the Mayo clinic can market their expertise to other patients (Berry & Seltman, 2009)

This is a well distributed group of patients regarding sex and race but there are some differentiators regarding location to the facility and the age of the patient.  The patients, as they grow older, need more specialized care.  This type of care is the target market of the Mayo Clinic.  While the Mayo Clinic does not focus primarily on geriatric or older patients, the nature of becoming older provides more instances or occurrences for particular diseases and ailments to occur.  The focus on the younger patients should still not suffer due to an increased focus on the older patients but there is a tendency for the older patients to fill the rooms of the Mayo Clinic at a greater rate than those in other age demographics.

There are also the patients that must travel to receive care at the Mayo Clinic.  Due to the fact that the Mayo Clinic treats difficult cases known as tertiary care there is an added layer of difficulty to the marketing model.  Tertiary care is that when a patient comes from their primary or secondary health care professional to a facility with highly advanced medical facilities and practices to serve the specialized needs of that patient.  The reason why many of the patients travel long distances to get to the Mayo Clinic is due in part to the fact that they have already been seen by multiple physicians and are referred by those physicians to receive treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

The focus of the demographics puts the marketing into a position to develop a lifestyle profile that points out the top interests and demographics of a particular neighborhood or community.  The lifestyle profile pulls out the major contributing factors to selection of the Mayo Clinic as well as the top two demographics that choose the Mayo Clinic.  The top areas are concerning the age demographic in which the upper echelon of the age demographic contributes to the vast majority of the composition of patients (Lee 2008).  Next is the distance to the facility which is in relation to the referrals and the network of doctors that have access to refer their patients to the Mayo Clinic.  There are other discriminatory factors that go into the lifestyle profile of the community in which they put high emphasis on the amount of services provide, the quality of those services, the staff and amount of research conducted.

The facility could segment their markets based on the information above by different areas.  The first area is how the referrals come into their offices.  The referrals come from 200-500 miles away as the majority but the expertise and specialization could help that referral system extend and capture even a larger market if proportioned correctly.  The focus on selecting key facilities and doctors throughout the nation and encouraging their referral can expand their range to capture more of the market. The next way to segment the market is to focus on marketing to the upper tier age demographic.  By providing these current or future patients the information on what the Mayo Clinic has to offer the patients could request the referral and potential garner the services of the Mayo Clinic and their expertise.

The research conducted shed light on the demographics of who participate as patients at the Mayo Clinic.  The demographics found that an older group of society traveling a longer distance, partake in the immense medical knowledge and treatment provided at the Mayo Clinic.  This falls right in line with the model the Mayo Clinic has developed as a tertiary health care provide and a center of excellence in research and medical services.  The lifestyle profile fits the key characteristics for what is valued at the Mayo Clinic and is representative of the type of patient that uses the medical services.  The Mayo Clinic’s focus on research, disease understanding and excellence in patient care drive the tertiary care and treatment needs of the upper age demographic as well as driving the amount of demand to increase the amount of travel each patient conducts to receive that treatment.  The research falls in line with the model of the Mayo Clinic and the lifestyle profile demonstrates the lifestyle preferences of the community that would utilize the Mayo Clinic.

References

Berry, L. L., & Seltman, K. D. (2009). Management lessons from mayo clinic, inside one of the world\’s most admired service organizations. McGraw-Hill Professional.

Brennan, M., Miner, K., and Rizza, R. (1998). The Mayo Clinic. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 83 (10): 3427.

Lee, A., (2008). How to build a lasting brand.  Retrieved from: http://www.fastcompany.com/990144/how-build-lasting-brand.

Mayo Clinic. (2011). Facts and highlights. Retrieved from:  http://www.mayoclinic.org/mcitems/mc2000-mc2099/mc2045.pdf.