The Office of Mayo Clinic Experience: A Strategy to Continuously Improve Patient Experience

At Mayo Clinic, the culture is centered on the primary motto, “the needs of the patient come first.” However, this culture has been challenged by both internal and external forces. While patient and family experience has always been a high priority for the organization, experience metrics were stable but stagnant from 2015 (when Mayo Clinic began working with a new vendor for patient-experience surveys) through 2018. Since that time, the percentage of patients recommending the top “Likely to Recommend” score across the Mayo Clinic has shown significant improvement, from an overall of 82.9% in 2017 to 87.7% in 2021. Improvement has been observed across all four major survey types: Outpatient, Inpatient, ED, and Ambulatory Surgery. Outpatient clinic rank, which represents more than 75% of the total returns, increased from the 53rd to the 84th percentile. In this article, the authors describe the structural and philosophical changes that supported this improvement and the evolution into what is now described as the Mayo Clinic Experience.