Source: www.chron.com Author: Leonard L. Berry & Kent D. Seltman Three goals underscore our nation's ongoing health care reform debate: 1) insurance for the uninsured, 2) improved quality and 3) reduced cost. Mayo Clinic serves as a model for higher quality health care at a lower cost. President Barack Obama, after referencing Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, advised, “We should learn from their successes and promote the best practices, not the most expensive ones.” Atul Gawande writes in The New Yorker, “Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest 15 percent of the country — $6,688 per enrollee in 2006.” Two pivotal lessons from our recent in-depth study of Mayo Clinic demonstrate cost efficiency and clinical effectiveness. Patient-first medicine: Throughout its 140-year history, Mayo Clinic has never put money first but lives its primary value: The needs of the patient come first. Mayo doctors, as all employees, are on salary. And the physicians are not extravagantly paid as their salaries are targeted between the 70th and 80th percentiles of a national physician compensation survey that includes the leading academic medical centers in the U.S. No doctor earns more by ordering an extra test or procedure. No doctor earns less by referring a patient to another Mayo physician with more expertise. Core values guide organizational behavior, and Mayo Clinic's patient-first core value guides the more than 43,000 employees. For instance, the head of [...]