Walking the Talk: How Mayo Clinic Delivers Patient-First Team Care

This case is used internally at Kellogg and is not available for public distribution.

When you arrive at the Mayo Clinic, you don’t quite know what to expect. As parents of a first-grader with brain cancer, you and your spouse are painfully experienced with hospitals—and, like 85% of Americans, you were already familiar with the Mayo Clinic’s reputation as a top-ranked medical provider. Indeed, that reputation is interwoven with the institution’s history: Famous patients include Nancy and Ronald Reagan, the Dalai Lama, King Hussein of Jordan, Helen Keller, Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, and John McCain. That’s a big reason why you’ve flown across two time zones to a small city in what feels like the middle of nowhere—Rochester, Minnesota—to seek treatment for an inoperable tumor growing deep within your son’s cerebrum.