Mayo Clinic

Team Members

Team Awards

2014
INFORMS Prize: Winner(s)
Citation:

The 2014 INFORMS Prize is awarded to Mayo Clinic for their sustained, novel, and rich legacy of integrating advanced analytics and operations research/management sciences (OR/MS) with clinical care, research, education, and administration to consistently deliver the best care to every patient.

Mayo Clinic’s century-long history of using systems thinking, analytics, and operations research traces its roots back to Dr. Henry Plummer, who developed the first integrated, paper medical record as a platform to organize and share patient information within a group practice of medicine. This served as the foundation of Mayo Clinic’s culture of applying engineering and operations research principles and methods.

Mayo Clinic continues to make significant investments to ensure a sophisticated advanced analytics and operations research infrastructure. With more than 500 OR/MS practitioners, Mayo Clinic is able to continually leverage analytical methods to enhance strategic planning, care process redesign, patient experience, inventory management, and project management--leading to important patient benefits as well as financial savings. Example projects include optimization models for patient scheduling; queuing theory for effectively transporting patients; systems dynamics for strategic capital allocation planning; simulation modeling to redesign pharmacies to reduce patient waiting time; and discrete-event simulation models and heuristics for blood management.

In addition to applying advanced analytics and operations research to its business, Mayo Clinic has made significant strides to educate their staff and disseminate what they’ve learned. The College of Medicine at Mayo Medical School, Quality Academy, and Systems Engineering and Operations Research collaborative educate staff in tools, methods, and data analytics. Mayo Clinic also offers academic rank in Health Care Systems Engineering to staff who make significant contributions in the development and translation of OR/MS research.

Mayo Clinic’s leadership recognizes analytics and engineering as key contributors to the organization’s sustained excellence, market differentiation, and superior customer experience. Looking to the future, senior leaders at Mayo Clinic consider these disciplines to be vital in addressing the formidable challenges facing healthcare today.