When Mayo Clinic‘s pitch to the legislature about their desire to make Rochester the hub of a Destination Medical Center for $6.5 billion, there was some buzz about it but then it died off.
Or so it seemed.
Fast Company just published The $6.5 Billion, 20-Year Plan To Transform An American City: Rochester, Minnesota, is home to the world-famous Mayo Clinic. Will an ambitious new project make it a global medical-tourism destination?
One of the world’s best-known hospitals has a problem.
The Mayo Clinic is located in the small city of Rochester (pop. 111,000), about a two-hour drive from Minneapolis, Minnesota. And it is, right this minute, competing fiercely for a small-but-extremely-lucrative slice of the global medical tourism industry. The wealthy American, European, east Asian, and Gulf Arab patients who have been the clinic’s bread and butter have been instead choosing to get treatment abroad or at domestic rivals like Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University or the Cleveland Clinic. But that may be changing—and the reason, if not the construction, is simple: the Destination Medical Center.
But it’s not just medical tourism. It’s also turning Rochester in to a biotech startup hub:
That’s an audacious 20-year plan by Rochester, the Minnesota state government, the Mayo Clinic, and their private partners to spend more than $6.5 billion on a kind of real-life version of SimCity, designed to turn Rochester into a global biotech hub, and double its population in the process.
Seems like there is a phenomenal opportunity to accelerate Minnesota into the medical tourism space as well as a focus on biotech…if the legislature looks ahead strategically. We hope they will.