Mayo Clinic: Disincentive system that works.

Disincentive system that works.

Virtually all Mayo employees are salaried with no incentive payments, separating the number of patients seen or procedures performed from personal gain. One surgeon refers to this tradition as a ‘‘disincentive system that works.’’ Adds another surgeon: “By not having our economics tied to our cases, we are free to do what comes naturally, and that is to help one another out. .  .. Our system removes a set of perverse incentives and permits us to make all clinical decisions on the basis of what is best for the patient.”

These are values that can be traced directly back to William Mayo and Charles Mayo, who, together with their father, William Worrall Mayo, founded Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic in 1903. The Clinic was one of the first examples of group practice in the United States. As Doctor William Mayo explained in 1905: “The best interest of the patient is the only interest to be considered, and in order that the sick may have the benefit of advancing knowledge, union of forces is necessary…it has become necessary to develop medicine as a cooperative science.”