Mayo Clinic is planning a $5 billion expansion of its flagship campus in Rochester, Minnesota, and health system leaders claim it will “reimagine” how patient care is delivered.
Leaders from Mayo Clinic—which consistently ranks as the top US hospital—announced on November 28 plans to design a hospital with technology like artificial intelligence (AI) “infused” into it, which execs say will improve care delivery.
The expansion will “enable transformation by blurring the lines across hospital, clinic, and digital care to help our teams anticipate our patients’ needs, accelerate more cures, and greater connections to our patients,” Mayo Clinic President and CEO Gianrico Farrugia said in a statement.
The goal of integrating tech into the hospital’s design is to give clinicians more time to spend with patients rather than completing administrative work, Sherry Wolf, Mayo Clinic’s chief nursing officer, said in a statement. Execs added that the technology will include robotics, automation, and predictive analytics.
The renovation plans include five new buildings that will occupy a combined 2.4 million square feet in space. The updated hospital will consist of “neighborhoods,” which health system leaders said will “bring services together around common patient needs and diseases, creating continuous care environments that will serve as patients’ homes while they are at Mayo Clinic.”
“Our vision includes putting everything a patient needs, including labs, imaging, consultations and treatments, near each other in unified care neighborhoods, which both streamlines the patient experience and better supports our team-based care model,” Amy Williams, the health system’s executive dean of practice, said in a statement.
The neighborhoods will help Mayo Clinic “blur the lines between inpatient and outpatient” care to create a “seamless experience” for patients, Williams told Healthcare Brew.
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The new hospital design also includes what Mayo Clinic leaders call a “flexible grid,” meaning rooms can be converted to serve multiple purposes. For example, a patient’s room could be converted into an operating room or an imaging room if needed, Williams said. That makes it so “the patient doesn’t need to be transferred back and forth to different teams,” she added.
The updated hospital will also take environmental sustainability into consideration, and Mayo Clinic has partnered with multiple organizations to help design an eco-conscious hospital, Williams said. “To invest this amount of money and not be responsible in that way would be terrible,” she added.
In addition to the multibillion-dollar renovation at the Rochester campus, Mayo Clinic is completing similar renovations at its hospitals in Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin, according to Williams, though none at the same scale as the flagship campus.
Williams said the Mayo Clinic will need to hire new staff to accommodate the larger facilities. The plan is to gradually bring in workers over a number of the years as opposed to suddenly increasing the proportion of new staff, she added.
Mayo Clinic leaders said construction is set to start in early 2024, and some of the new facilities could be open by 2028. The expansion is expected to be complete by 2030. Williams said the hospital is expecting no disruptions to day-to-day operations while the construction is taking place.
Mayo Clinic is funding the expansion with its own money, which comes from the health system’s investments and operating margin. The funds had been set aside to reinvest in “transforming healthcare,” according to Williams.