Hasta La Ideas

Since its inception in 2008, the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation has become the poster child for internal innovation practices. The Center for Innovation focuses on engaging all of the stakeholders in the healthcare system, from doctors to patients to staff, and introducing the design process as a means of taking healthcare to the next level. We had the chance to sit down with the Center for Innovation’s Gerry Greaney and Molly McMahon to talk about how design is reshaping healthcare.

Core77: What is the Center for Innovation?

Gerry Greaney: We’re a very interesting and diverse group with backgrounds in design, healthcare, finance, budget management, IT, and we’re taking the design thinking and design research approach to try to transform the delivery experience of healthcare.

Have you seen the Center transform, along with the culture and behaviors at the Clinic?

Molly McMahon: Definitely. When we first started, we moved out of this kind of raw space in the back area that wasn’t finished and that was also right inside the patient clinic hallway. Our team was split—we didn’t have a dedicated space for ourselves. Then last March, we moved into to this new, open space with everyone on the same floor. Space is a [scarce] commodity and really valued at Mayo. If you’re given more space, then you’re worth something. It shows that the Clinic has made an investment in us as well as through the work that we’ve been doing.

GG: I think what’s happened over the past couple of years is that more and more groups throughout Mayo have engaged with the Center and as they’ve done that, they’ve started to really understand what the value is. When you bring something like a design approach into a medical institution, it’s very different than the scientific, analytical lab approach that’s prominent there. It’s hard to understand initially what the value of this is—until you experience it. And then once you go through that, you can see the benefit. And when that happens, more people talk about it. It’s about getting a foothold.

What kinds of attitudes have you seen? When you say, “I do design and innovation,” do people balk at that?

MM: I would say it’s more of a slight confusion or an ‘Explain more,’ because as soon as you say the word ‘design,’ from their perspective, they’re looking at it as, “Are you designing the curtains in the room or the bed? What are you trying to design around or change?” From that, I think it’s more of a confusion around the term ‘service design’ and how it fits into how what they’re doing and what we’re going to provide to their services.

GG: I think there are times when people may wonder why we’re needed and we have to show why we are. Maybe we go a little further to do that and to really capture the stories people tell and things we’re told by patients and then translate it into something that applies to the work that needs to be done.

So why is the Center for Innovation needed?

GG: I think it’s because there’s only so much you can do to address the change that needs to happen in healthcare with the approaches that have been tried already. So there are certain things that you can identify through equality efforts, things that have made huge progress in improving efficiency. But there are certain things that you don’t see when you look at things that way. By looking very carefully through a patient experience and trying to understand the greater context of health for patients, you start to see some opportunities that you might not see if we were only focused on purely the medical side of things, purely the care aspect.

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