Richard Gray, MD, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Arizona, told Becker’s the 1.2 million-square-foot expansion — part of the “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” strategic initiative — aligns with Mayo Clinic’s broader “Bold. Forward.” strategy and its long-term vision for national growth and innovation.
Editor’s note: Responses are lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: Mayo Clinic’s “Bold. Forward.” strategy aims to “cure, connect and transform” healthcare. How does “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” specifically align with and advance that strategy?
Dr. Richard Gray: “Bold. Forward.” is intended to cure, connect and transform healthcare — specifically, by Mayo Clinic leading in providing new cures and new care for patients with the most serious and complex conditions; connecting people with data to produce new insights and more personalized and proactive care; and transforming healthcare to a more platform approach, where we can bring the best solution from anyone to patients who need them, wherever they are — not just those that physically come to Mayo Clinic.
The centerpiece of our transform portion is the creation of Mayo Clinic Platform, which is a collaboration of nearly half of the top 11 healthcare organizations in the world, across four continents, to create a distributed data network that has the depth, breadth and heterogeneity of data on patients across socioeconomic class; urban versus rural; racial, ethnic categories, to ensure we can create and validate the most effective AI models to help anyone.
The rules of the road are that any values-aligned solution developer can leverage Mayo Clinic Platform data to create and validate algorithms, as long as those algorithms are then available on the platform for any healthcare organization that wishes to be part of the platform to take in to benefit their patients. So, that Mayo Clinic Platform piece is to benefit all of healthcare and all of society.
We’re “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” in Arizona, which fits into that. With this new way — this new platform and data-informed, personalized and proactive approach to healthcare — we need facilities that allow for that kind of delivery of care, where we are blending those data- and AI-driven pieces. At Mayo Clinic, we now have over 300 AI models in various stages of deployment, to where our facilities become more intelligent.
In some ways, they are intelligent facilities that become part of the care team, and what Mayo Clinic is best known for is teamwork and multiple specialists working together around patients with complex conditions. So we need these facilities to both grow so that we can impact more patients at Mayo Clinic, but more importantly, transform the way that future healthcare models will be carried out — in a way that is safer, more personalized to patients, and leverages the advantages of AI-driven solutions that are created on platforms like the Mayo Clinic Platform.
Q: With this expansion increasing clinical space in Phoenix by nearly 60%, how is Mayo Clinic strategically planning for workforce growth, technology integration and operational efficiency to support this level of expansion?
RG: What makes Mayo Clinic special is our special people who are both humble and brilliant and come together and execute on our core value that the best interest of the patient is the only interest to be considered. The needs of the patient come first.
So people are the center of our strategy — our Mayo Clinic people helping people, our patients. And so we do absolutely have a workforce strategy with this, because, in the next 10 years, with this expansion, we will be adding 3,500 full-time equivalents, which means even more than 3,500 jobs at Mayo Clinic in Arizona specifically. That will encompass a lot of different skill sets, from physicians to scientists to nurses to other healthcare technicians.
As part of that, we have been, for quite some time, developing our workforce pipeline. Mayo Clinic, of course, combines clinical practice, research and education, and within education, we have five schools of education. Those five schools within Mayo Clinic provide a significant pipeline of talent to bring into our organization. But we also collaborate with a lot of other organizations.
We have collaborations with Arizona State University within the Phoenix metropolitan area. Across Mayo Clinic, we have collaborations with universities elsewhere. We collaborate with community colleges in our region and even technical schools. So we are very proactive at mapping out when we will need specific skill sets. And because this is a transformation, we also need to reskill and upskill our existing workforce for these new models of care, and we are carrying those out as well.
We have a program for our existing employees to increase their education, where we cover that so that they can increase their skill sets — either formally through additional degrees or informally through internal or external educational programs that provide additional skills.
In terms of technology integration, we’ve added a lot of automation to unburden our staff from routine tasks so that they can spend more time and attention on meeting the needs of our patients and, quite frankly, have more joy in what they do. What they enjoy doing is being with and caring for patients. What they don’t enjoy doing are the routine administrative tasks, and so we are definitely integrating technology into that.
We are also unburdening them in some aspects where we can leverage technology to keep patients safe and informed. Some of those more routine or worrisome tasks — how do I make sure that a patient doesn’t have a fall?, for example — can be eased with technology integration, helping provide staff with greater peace of mind.
Q: In addition to Arizona, Mayo’s “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” physical plan also includes projects underway in Rochester and in Jacksonville, Fla., and Mayo Clinic Health System‘s recently completed projects in Mankato, Minn., and La Crosse, Wis. How does the Arizona project fit into Mayo’s broader long-term vision for national growth and innovation?
RG: All of this fits together very cohesively. All of that is part of the “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” phase of our overall “Bold. Forward.” strategy, knowing we need greater facilities for those patients who need to physically come to us. Even though we’re reaching more through digital solutions, for those patients who come to us, we need to do so in a different way — with more technology integration, with more automation and with different approaches for patients.
Specifically, some of the other principles of “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” that are being carried out in Arizona, Jacksonville and Rochester — and to a degree in our health system — are things like creating care neighborhoods. As healthcare facilities grow and become very large, it starts to be daunting and even intimidating for patients.
So we’ve taken it as a principle to map out patient journeys and, as much as possible, create care neighborhoods where patients can come and have a more familiar area. Similar to all of us, wherever we are, we have access to a lot of things we need close by — maybe our grocery store, a hardware store, a pharmacy, whatever it may be in our neighborhood. Now, we all know we need to leave our neighborhoods for certain things, but there’s that comfort and familiarity with most of the things we access around our neighborhood.
It’s a similar principle we’re executing on through “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” — not just in Arizona, but also at our other sites — creating care neighborhoods where patients more often enter a space that is familiar to them, where they can get most of their needs met without traveling across a large medical campus. They can feel that sense of home, belonging and familiarity that gives them more peace of mind. When coming to Mayo Clinic, they are often facing some of the most serious and complex conditions patients can face.
Similarly, we are focused on creating very intuitive and simple patient wayfinding and engendering trust. All of those components are part of the strategic planning for “Bold. Forward. Unbound.” So yes, this is about expanding access to Mayo Clinic for those patients with the most serious and complex conditions, and that’s extremely important, but it’s also about transforming the way we do healthcare — technology-enabled, AI-driven, data-driven — but in a way that makes technology feel like it’s in the background. It’s just that things are better, and patients feel more comfortable. They feel that sense of trust and ease.