Mayo Clinic Governance and Structure

Background of the Organization
Mayo Clinic is a not-for-profit organization headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota, USA. The organization was founded in 1864 by William Worrall Mayo, William James Mayo, Charles Horace Mayo, Augustus Stinchfield, Christopher Graham, Henry Stanley Plummer, Melvin Millet, Star Judd, and Donald Balfour. Mayo Clinic is focused on offering integrated clinical practice, research, and education (Swensen, Gorringe, Caviness, & Peters, 2016). Currently, the organization employs 65,000 employees of these about 6,600 are physicians and scientists and the rest make up administrative and allied health staff. Mayo Clinic operates the Mayo Clinic Health System that comprises more than 70 hospitals and clinics that are located across Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science is also operated by Mayo Clinic. It is a nonprofit college that is dedicated to training medical and allied health professionals.
Mayo Clinic specializes in treating difficult cases through destination medicine and tertiary care. With a focus on caring for patients who have serious, complex illnesses. The organization operates in five states. Annually, the organization cares for more than one million patients from all the 50 states and outside the country (Swensen et al., 2016). The United States News and World Report has ranked Mayo Clinic #1. Mayo Clinic has developed numerous medical and surgical specialties including heart and lung surgery, cancer research, and laboratory techniques. All these have resulted in two of its staff members being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1950 for their discovery of cortisone.
Mayo Clinic's mission is to inspire hope and contribute to health and well-being by providing the best care to every patient through integrated clinical practice, research, and education. The needs of the patient come first at Mayo Clinic. The majority of the patient who visits Mayo Clinic are referrals from smaller clinics and hospitals located in the upper Midwest and the United States (Helmers & Harper, 2019). Physicians working for Mayo Clinic are paid a fixed salary that is not linked to the volume of patients they see. This ensures that there is no monetary motivation to see patients in large numbers. In turn, physicians can spend more time with individual patients and attend to them without any rush.
Organizational Structure
Mayo Clinic employs a hybrid organizational structure, with the structure being a blend and amalgamation of the functional organizational structure together with the geographical and projected organizational structure. This particular structure plays a significant role in the operations of the organization based on the actuality that personnel can share their knowledge and competencies across the various functional divisions, permitting for better and more effective communication, in addition to understanding the role of every function. Furthermore, by working in tandem with the different functions, the personnel can widen their set of skills and knowledge, which also facilitates growth within the organization (Jensen & Heckling, 1995). By using a hybrid organizational structure, Mayo Clinic can have more flexibility in the distribution of work and roles assignment. Employees of the organization have a shared mission they can work on different projects in different sectors. What is most clear is that there is a unified team of individuals who have a common goal, have a different experience, and interest levels. This structure allows an employee to perform work where they are best suited, moving from one project to another and reporting to different individuals when necessary. This flexibility allows Mayo Clinic to serve its patients and stakeholders with the same level of expertise regardless of where the health care facility is located. Maintaining the level of service is beneficial to the patients are they do not feel abandoned and they get the best care that can be offered to them.
Having prioritized the needs of the patient, Mayo Clinic can meet these needs by using a hybrid organization structure. The organization's mission is to inspire hope and contribute towards the health and well-being of its patients and this can be best achieved by using the hybrid structure. To offer the best care to each patient the health care professionals must be assigned roles and duties that are indicative of their capability. This way the individual can deliver care to the patients and use his or her skills properly. Learning is also encouraged in the organization since employees are working in different functions based on the project being handled (Helmers & Harper, 2019). These increased skills are vital for the organization as employees can receive and pass on skills and knowledge, which benefits the organization. The hybrid structure encourages growth as employees are challenged and encouraged to take up roles within different departments. Learning how each department operates and its functions ensure that there will be continuity for the organization as employees understand how most functions of the organization operate. The hybrid structure allows the organization to share highly skilled resources for different projects, which maximizes the value of its employees. It is possible to have an employee working concurrently on different projects and this further increases their knowledge base.
Stakeholder Relationship Diagram
Some of the external stakeholders of Mayo Clinic are physicians, nurses, patients, supervisors, students, professors, and the government. Physicians are responsible for diagnosing and treating patients who visit Mayo Clinic. Without physicians, the organization would not be able to treat the patients. The experience of the physicians is vital if the organization is to keep to its mission of offering the best care to its patients. The organization is dependent on the physicians and the physicians are also dependent on the organization. The physicians expect the organization to offer them a competitive salary and the organization expects the physicians to provide the best care to the patients/ clients. Nurses offer support to the physicians and while they are working inside the organization, they are still external stakeholders since they do not own the organization. Nurses are charged with delivering the appropriate care and to act on the instructions of the physicians. Nurses interact with patients the most and they deliver and administer medication to patients. They also educate patients on how they can best care for themselves and the treatment regimen. Nurses play a vital role in ensuring that patients are seen by the appropriate physician and that patients get the treatment they deserve. This is done by interacting with the patient when he or she comes to the health care facility.
Supervisors are charged with overseeing the activities of the other staff members and following up to ensure that the organizational goals are achieved. Physicians and nurses will have supervisors who are their peers and they understand the particular work that needs to be done. Supervisors are responsible for following up with the employees and being a liaison between the organization and the other stakeholders. Patients will seek the best services and the expect to receive expert advice when they visit a health facility. Patients are the reason why Mayo Clinic is in operation today. If there were no patients the organization would not have anyone to offer its services to or to conduct research to benefit others. The organization has set a standard of quality that it uses to mee the needs of its patients.
Since Mayo Clinic has a college of medicine its other stakeholders are the students. Students come to college to gain knowledge and new skills. The organization must have a good relationship with its students as they are the ones who will come to work in its health facilities after they complete their studies. Professors are charged with educating students and they work for the organization. The professors could be doubling as physicians or nurses within the organization. Taking up the additional role to impart their knowledge to others who will take over from them in the future. The government is a stakeholder since it might be funding some of the research and studies that are conducted by Mayo Clinic employees (Helmers, Gabrielson, & Harper, 2016).
Mayo Clinic serves as a referral facility for smaller clinics and other hospitals and this makes these two facilities as entities within the health care community (Peterson & Morris, 2019). Being a referral facility, Mayo Clinic has to ensure that maintains its standards and continues accepting referrals from these health care facilities that do not have the capability and expertise to care for the patients. Regardless of where the patient comes from, Mayo Clinic offers the same services to all patients and this ensures that it will continue receiving referral patients not only from facilities close by but even from further afield.
Conclusion
Understanding the operations of an organization is no easy task. It is always interesting to get to learn more about an organization that one has a keen interest on. Knowing how it runs its operations, and the relevant stakeholders give insights that were not readily available. Using a hybrid organization structure, it becomes clear as to why the organization has managed to achieve all that it has and the awards it receives. This could all be linked back to the structure used within the organization, which lays out the advantages of this structure over the others. The role played by different stakeholders is vital to understand how the organization manages each stakeholder.
References
Helmers, R. A., Gabrielson, S. R., & Harper, M. M. (2016). Developing a new governance structure: the Mayo Clinic experience. Physician leadership journal, 3(3), 40-46.
Helmers, R. A., & Harper, C. M. (2019). The mayo clinic model of clinical integration. Paper presented at the Healthcare.
Jensen, M. C., & Heckling, W. H. (1995). Specific and general knowledge, and organizational structure. Journal of applied corporate finance, 8(2), 4-18.
Peterson, K. S., & Morris, B. C. (2019). Creating synergy between academia and practice: the Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic Arizona model. Journal of Professional Nursing, 35(4), 305-313.
Swensen, S., Gorringe, G., Caviness, J., & Peters, D. (2016). Leadership by design: intentional organization development of physician leaders. Journal of management development.

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