The Good Old Days

The Florida Campus of Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville is pretty busy these days.

In 2017, Jacksonville’s Mayo Clinic announced a massive expansion plan. Totaling over $70 million, on top of $300 million that it’s already invested in developing its hospital campus, the effort serves to assert Mayo Clinic’s Florida Campus as both a leading medical center and an enormous economic driver in its region.

The vast effort includes an addition of over 300,000 square feet to the facility over the next five years that will accommodate hundreds of new staff and medical research capabilities.

The plan specifically includes an expansion to the Mayo Building South which will add four floors totaling 80,000 square feet to the current one-story facility and will provide new space for practice in cardiology and cardiovascular/cardio-thoracic surgery. The effort will also provide a center for spine and pain rehabilitation programs, radiology equipment for molecular imaging, and increases in general laboratory resources.

The plan also includes renovations to 40,000 existing square feet of the clinic’s Davis building.

The eight-story Davis Building is the tallest building on the Mayo Clinic Florida campus. It houses many specialty medical and surgical ser-
vices, as well as the the Bundy Café & Atrium, the Mayo Pharmacy and the Mayo Optical Shop.

Furthermore, the construction of a brand new 150,000 square foot, four-story building (with the potential to expand eleven more stories) which will provide assorted cancer-related and neurological/neurosurgical care is scheduled for 2018.

Finally, Mayo Clinic announced a partnership with United Therapeutics Corp. to construct a three-story, 75,000-square-foot building to accommodate new technologies aimed at improving the volume of lungs for transplantation. Scheduled for completion in 2019, the building will act as both a contributor to the medical community and a driver for economic development in the region, providing new space for an innovative biotechnology center aimed at attracting new companies to Northeast Florida.

Of the overall undertaking, Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, vice president of Mayo Clinic and CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida, said, “To solidify our position as the premier destination medical center in the Southeast, we plan to recruit the brightest people, significantly expand our space, and continuously improve our technology to enhance our ability to deliver the highest quality care for our patients.”

It seems that for Mayo Clinic’s Florida campus, the “good old days” are now!

So, how did Mayo Clinic reach such a state of success?

The Problem

While the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida is currently experiencing a series of expansions, additions, and overall advancements the likes of which it’s never experienced before…it wasn’t always so. In fact, less than one decade ago, the Mayo Clinic’s impact was little known.

Much can be speculated about any given institution’s economic contributions to a local region, but without quantifiable evidence of those contributions, figures put to paper are merely that: speculation. Additionally, with the degree to which institutions support local economies frequently unknown to the public, many entities receive little attention and face the challenge of remaining underfunded each year.

So, for a long time, the collective economic impact of all campuses of Mayo Clinic nationwide, let alone the impact of any individual regional campus, was largely a mystery. As such, public knowledge of the roles that Mayo Clinic campuses played in sustaining or promoting the economic health of their respective regions were underappreciated, if appreciated at all.

Mayo Clinic is one of the largest non-profit healthcare organizations in the United States. Striving for recognition as an international leader in clinical care, medical research, and medical/health education, the organization operates three major campuses across the United States: one in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota. Additionally, the Mayo Health System also provides secondary health care services to approximately 70 communities throughout southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. But despite its size, its reach, and the scope of its services, the Mayo Clinic as a quantifiable force in contributing to the overall condition of the U.S. economy went unrecognized.

Mayo Clinic’s annual operations made a difference to the U.S. economy and to the economies of their respective regions. They just had to find a way to prove it.

The Solution

To make the value of Mayo Clinic campuses to their regional economies known, the clinic was going to need to take an operative approach. To turn the knowledge of their role into actionable attention, they turned to economic impact analysis and commissioned a data-driven study which put their efforts into numbers.

The researchers created a link between the potential of land loss and resulting economic impacts by first defining how much land would likely wash away in several future scenarios as described by models referenced by the 2012 Coastal Master Plan. The next step in the research was to quantify the economic contribution of the business and household spending activity conducted on those lands as well as the assets at risk and their replacement costs.

In 2009, Mayo Clinic commissioned the Battelle Memorial Institute (“Battelle”) to quantify the economic impact of the entire Mayo Clinic system on the U.S. economy and on each location’s respective regional economy. In conducting the study, Battelle used 2008 IMPLAN economic impact data to assess “backward linkages” in Mayo Clinic’s intermediate expenditures (business-to-business purchases) to measure the effects of the clinic’s spending on other businesses and on the people those businesses employ.

To begin the study, Battelle gathered operational data like full-time equivalent employment, wage and benefit figures, and revenue and expense figures from Mayo Clinic pertaining to each of its locations across the country. Then, using IMPLAN’s data and sophisticated modeling tool, Battelle was able to quantify the clinic’s spending and learn the Direct, Indirect, and Induced Effects with regards to employment, personal income, output, and tax revenue for multiple operational groups.

With detailed information concerning the impacts of Mayo Clinic’s campuses on their respective regional economies, the organization suddenly had solid evidence of their value to both the national economy and those of the states in which they mainly operate. Now, it was a matter of getting the word out there!

Thousands of people come to Mayo Clinic’s campus in Jacksonville, Florida, annually for diagnosis or treatment of a medical condition. In Florida, Mayo Clinic doctors in the Primary Care centers treat people of all ages.

The Results

After performing an economic impact analysis on the Mayo Clinic, the results started getting attention.

After the release of the study’s findings, multiple news outlets picked up the story and reported on the study’s findings, widely publicizing the effects of Mayo Clinic’s operations and role as an economic giant. Additionally, many other organizations local to the areas referenced in Battelle’s report, both inside and outside of the healthcare sector, commented on the incredible findings.

In 2010, the Flinn Foundation, a private grant making organization in Phoenix, Arizona, commented on the healthcare sector’s impact on the economy in the state of Arizona, saying, “As dismal as 2009 was for Arizona’s economy, the state would have been in significantly worse shape without the strong performance of the health-care sector, the only segment to add jobs for the year.” Of Mayo Clinic’s specific contributions, Simon Tripp, senior director of the Battelle Memorial Institute, added, “The study confirms that Mayo Clinic is a national economic force, but what’s particularly interesting is the size and scope of not only their clinical practice, but also research and educational services. Mayo Clinic home states and regions are likely to see significant further impacts and benefits in the future.”

Fast forwarding to 2015, Mayo Clinic’s Florida Campus in Jacksonville announced a partnership with St. Vincent’s HealthCare to collaborate on a new cancer clinic, providing staff to the facility located on St. Vincent’s Medical Center Riverside campus. The effort serves to support even more jobs indirectly as a result of the operations of Mayo Clinic, but also to help stimulate further local economic activity and job creation by aiding neighboring organizations throughout the region in providing the same economic encouragement. Of the partnership, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida, Gianrico Farrugia, commented, “Both institutions are an important part of the local fabric of this great community. By joining forces, we will only strengthen the delivery and quality of cancer care in this region.”