A day in the life of Mayo Clinic

Jan. 25—ROCHESTER — Donned in his royal blue, long-sleeved Mayo Clinic shirt, black slacks and black walking shoes, Randy Erickson makes roughly 30 trips all over the downtown campus each day, taking patients who use wheelchairs to and from their appointments.

When a patient arrives, other General Services staff will transfer the patient into a Mayo Clinic wheelchair and put in a request for transport. After that message is relayed through dispatch, it is assigned to a transporter. When Erickson receives a run, the request shows up through an app on his work phone. It includes the patient's name, date of birth, weight, location and drop-off destination. Erickson presses a button to accept the run, then heads off to meet the patient.

When he started working as a transporter almost seven years ago, Erickson would track the eight, 10, sometimes 12 miles he'd cover through his workday. It was "too devastating," Erickson said with a laugh, so he doesn't track his steps anymore.

Some patients don't want to talk, Erickson said. Some do, and he tries to keep the focus of the conversation on the patient.

"Everybody that's coming has some kind of story that's going on in their life," he said. "Something's happening. That's the reason they're here."

Erickson, after all, was introduced to Mayo Clinic in a similar way, years ago, when his son Silas was diagnosed with cancer. Randy, his wife, Ree, and Silas left their North Dakota home for almost a year while Silas underwent treatment in Rochester. He died in 2007 at the age of 3.

In the years since, Erickson started working at Mayo Clinic, the couple permanently moved to Rochester and they founded

Cy's Place,

a nonprofit that hosts families with children battling cancer in a guest apartment within the Ericksons' home.

"I know what it's like to be on their side of the equation," Erickson said. "I always try to picture myself in their place. How would I want to be treated?"

What started in 1864 as Dr. William Worrall Mayo's private practice in a small Minnesota town has since exploded into a powerhouse medical, education and research institution sprawled across continents. In its 160 years, Mayo Clinic has cared for

notable names

such as author Ernest Hemingway, baseball star Lou Gehrig, activist Helen Keller, former U.S. Senator John McCain and the 14th Dalai Lama.

Across this multistate and international enterprise, Rochester, Minnesota, has remained Mayo Clinic's home — the

Rochester campus

has 42,000 employees, about 55% of

Mayo Clinic's total workforce of 76,000

as of 2022. Today, Mayo Clinic is Minnesota's largest private employer.

In 2022, about 1.3 million patients received care through one of Mayo Clinic's campuses, according to the health system. That amounted to 5 million outpatient visits, more than 515,000 telemedicine appointments and 141,000 surgeries. Approximately 6,700 of those Mayo patients traveled to the United States from almost 130 countries.

At about the same time Erickson begins taking patients to and from their appointments, the loading docks at Mayo Clinic Laboratories are bustling with activity.

At about 8 a.m., the first of two FedEx shipping containers arrives directly from Rochester International Airport. The container of items bound for the Mayo lab on Superior Drive in Northwest is deliberately loaded onto the FedEx plane last in order to be the first one out, onto a truck and to its destination.

A second container arrives at the loading dock about 40 minutes later, giving lab intake staff enough time to open and funnel items from the first shipment.

On this day, Dec. 8, 2023, a team of more than 300 staff members will process more than 38,000 items sent to the lab. For them, it's an average day in the lab where 35,000 to 40,000 specimens are processed on any given day.

"It takes an army to do what we do," said Amanda Riley, senior manager for operations at Mayo Clinic Laboratories. "The sheer volume, just the size of it, all these specimens from all over the world, it's pretty exciting."

Most of the items arrive in "berry boxes," so called because of their eye-catching berry color. Inside each could be various vials, tubes, slides or other containers holding samples of tissues, organs, blood, hair, urine or other things sent to the lab from anywhere in the world for processing in Rochester. On this day, a morning shipment from Venezuela arrived at the loading dock.

Although the morning is the busiest, more items arrive throughout the day. Some come via seven other major transport carriers. Others, sometimes a single sample, arrive via couriers. Couriers make 1,268 daily route stops and about 600 on-call pickups.

Every "berry box" is opened by a robot that routes the contents to intake along the proper type of temperature. Samples arrive either in ambient air temperature, cooled or frozen.

"We process everything based on stability first," Riley said.

Contents are screened for radioactivity or contamination and routed to a decontamination room before hitting the lab floor.

If anything hazardous does make it to the lab floor, it would prompt the evacuation of the entire lab.

At the lab, sweeps of the floor are done every two hours to make sure nothing is misplaced.

At the end of the chain, the refuse is X-rayed before being sorted for recycling and reuse. The machine regularly catches small slides or other things that weren't properly packaged, including a blood vial that was put inside a gel cold pack with the pack resealed.

"We do our due diligence to make sure we don't miss anything," Riley said.

However, speed is still essential. The lab processes specimens for the Mayo Clinic patients and other organizations to help diagnose and determine treatment for patients. The clock is ticking for processing those.

"We can't assume we can get that exact same specimen again," Riley said.

The lab is also the heart of the for-profit side of Mayo Clinic.

The pathology lab is used by organizations to process samples of body tissue for diagnostic, forensic and research purposes.

Those lab results make their way back to health care providers such as Dr. Steven Alberts. Up on the Gonda Building's 10th floor, Alberts is spending the afternoon with pancreatic cancer patients. Sitting at a desk in the department workroom, Alberts types up his notes for the last patient before reviewing the next one's latest blood work and PET scans.

"On the average day, when I'm in the clinic, I'm either seeing new patients who are coming to Mayo for evaluation of their cancer — sometimes newly diagnosed, or people who have been receiving treatment elsewhere and are now looking for other treatment options as their cancer is progressing — and then the other part of my clinic schedule is seeing people in follow-up," said Alberts, an oncologist and chairman of Mayo Clinic's Division of Medical Oncology.

Originally, Alberts went to college to study fisheries. As a student, he started working with a professor who studied liver cancer in salmon and trout caused by toxic mold. From there, Alberts went to Alaska to study a cluster of liver cancer cases affecting an Indigenous community. Before progressing to medical school at the University of Washington, Alberts studied cancer at the population level as an epidemiologist.

He's been at Mayo Clinic in Rochester for 27 years.

"Came out here thinking I'd spend about three years here for some initial training in internal medicine," Alberts said, "and then stayed here for a fellowship and never left."

Outside the patient's room, Alberts gives the door a few gentle, quick knocks before entering. After greeting the patient and her husband — who are sitting side-by-side on a small couch next to the computer desk — Alberts asks the patient about her side effects from chemotherapy treatment. Then, he reviews the patient's latest labs with her, turning the computer monitor toward her so she can see. As Alberts explains how she has had "a better than average response" to her cancer treatment so far, her husband is diligently taking notes on a large notepad.

Thirty minutes later, in another exam room, Alberts checks in with another patient in the middle of treatment. His lab values look good, so Alberts tells him that he will have another PET scan in three months. The patient's wife gives Alberts a copy of the International Crane Foundation's latest newsletter, a gift inspired by their previous conversations about bird-watching.

That afternoon, Alberts visited with a handful of the

120,000-some patients with cancer

Mayo Clinic sees each year.

"Oncology's a field that provides that opportunity to have ongoing, close relationships with patients through the course of their disease," Alberts said. "But (it's) also an area that's interesting, exciting because of all the research that's going on, the growing knowledge and progressive changes in therapy that are, hopefully, making it a lot better for patients."

The same patients wheeled to their appointments by Randy Erickson or one of his colleagues will need a ride back when they're done.

One of Erickson's first runs of the day started on the Mayo Building's 17th floor. The patient had just wrapped up an appointment and, with a few hours until her next one, she wanted to wait in the quiet room on the Gonda ground floor. As Erickson pushes her wheelchair into the dark, curtained space, he grabs a disposable eye mask for her to use while she rests.

The day goes on. Transporting a mother from the Gonda lobby to the Eisenberg Building to see her hospitalized son. Two separate runs within Gonda to take empty wheelchairs to new locations. A 10-minute trek to bring a patient from the Gonda lobby through the underground subway system to the Dan Abraham Healthy Living Center. Another run from the Gonda lobby, this time with the optometry and ophthalmology department as the destination. Up on the Mayo Building's seventh floor, Erickson said it's one of the building's busiest spots.

After a run from the basement-level Skylight Cafeteria to the nephrology department on Mayo's 19th floor — a true bottom-to-top journey — Erickson gets a few minutes between assignments to look out at the city from the large, east-facing windows.

"Just helping people, it's a good thing," Erickson said. "We can be just a little part of helping them through the process and try to encourage them, and sometimes try and make them laugh or smile or just help them through the day."