Financial Management at Mayo Clinic

Financial Management

A major part and linchpin of any medical and/or research firm is the financial management aspects of the organization. Financial management of any major medical outfit would be overseen by the officers of the treasury and finance departments. They would, by extension, also direct the financial activities of the clinic. The activities completed would include bookkeeping, investing, and developing projects. The depth and breadth of these operations would touch upon a number of important things such as the methods of funding to be used, research issues, quality control, ethics, accreditation, awards, regulation, marketing, strategic management choices, branding and involvement with the employees and community. All of the above applies to the organization that is being focused on in this report, that being the Mayo Clinic. While all businesses and organizations have to focus on financial matters of some degree or form, the complexities and intricacy of the Mayo Clinic and their financial operations is staggering and vast.

Financial Management Aspects

The Mayo Clinic is a non-profit organization, so all funding comes from donations. The revenue it does collect through services (current activity puts revenue at more than $10 billion, with income generated through services being at $526 million and contributions from benefactors coming in at $277 million) goes to fund its development and expansion projects, including research, education, and clinical studies (Mayo Clinic Facts, 2015). The Mayo Clinic provides financial assistance for patients who meet criteria of federal poverty guidelines, and it also accepts Medicare and Medicaid, which are federally funded programs for low-income families. Moreover, the company is actively pushing for these federally funded programs to cover telemedicine, which is advanced eHealth services technology that allows patients to communicate with health care providers via digital technology and alleviates much of the stress and overwork of nurses, who otherwise are stretched thin; telemedicine is an innovative method of patient quality care that the Clinic embraces, which sets it even further apart from the standard health care providers across the nation that have yet to adopt eHealth services (Hiers, 2015).

Thus the main method of funding for the Clinic is through services provided, as the revenue is put back into the Clinic and its locations to serve the needs of the community and the greater global public. It also receives charitable donations which are tax-deductible. Further, these donations generate cash-flow in the form of income revenues. The research issues it is currently committed to covering include topics in neurology (which it is best known for), but essentially the Clinic covers everything from advanced liver disease to Alzheimer's to zebrafish genetics. Thus, it is not limited in terms of scope and encourages its researchers to push the envelope in terms of making new progress in various areas of medicine (Laboratories, 2015).

The Mayo Clinic Health System is accredited by The Joint Commission, which is a national accreditation organization for hospitals. Every three years, onsite reviews are conducted by the Commission in order to ensure that the Clinic remains compatible with criteria established by the Commission (Accreditation, 2015). Awards received by the Mayo Clinic range from institutional to individual types. The Mayo Clinic has been recognized as a Diversity Inc. top hospital, a top hospital for Hispanics in 2013 and individual awards have been given to surgeons and physicians at the clinic by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and the Rochester Heritage Preservation Committee (Awards, 2015). Its marketing and branding strategies are evident in its websites and its devotion to cultivating its image as a leader in excellent service, information and care provided within the medical community.

In completing its duties and initiatives, the Mayo Clinic needs to be mindful of ethics. They have to focus both on the issues that provably affect their operations as well as ones that could affect them in the future. Indeed, simply compliance with the law is not enough as there are ethical codes of conduct and practice in the medical community that go far beyond what the law happens to say about the matter. Just a few topics that the Mayo Clinic could discuss or be involved in is involvement of religion with healthcare, physician-assisted suicide, the proper dispensing and use of pain and anxiety medications given the rampant abuse of them that exists in the United States and so forth. The Mayo Clinic must also be careful about how they market and portray themselves. While the Mayo Clinic is certainly not a conventional for-profit healthcare agency, they must avoid the appearance of the same and must keep a neutral stance whenever ethical and possible. Mayo must also be mindful of the regulations and best practices that they are subject to from state agencies, evidenced-based practice results and so forth. With that in mind, the May Clinic has a department known as the Mayo Clinic Center for Translational Science Activities, or CTSA (Mayo, 2016).

In addition to the aforementioned community involvement, the commitment and involvement of the employees at the Mayo Clinic should also be fostered and sustained. This can be done in a variety of ways. This can include recognizing and treating people as human capital, having everyone in the system helping to build a knowledge base and knowledge management system that can benefit both Mayo specifically as well as the broader medical and other communities and so forth. Mayo needs to have an organizational culture that is committed to helping people, improving quality of care and so forth. Those that are looking to enrich and empower themselves should be told to look elsewhere and not within the Mayo culture and framework (HIMSS, 2016; Haughorn, 2016). People that work at Mayo or that lead the same should be focused on helping the public, serving others and ensuring the best outcomes possible for the most people when it comes to medical care, access to care and quality of care. Indeed, the cost of healthcare in the United States is high and going higher. The amount of compassion and assistance necessary to address these issues is and will remain substantial (Weiner, 2001).