Recently, Mayo Clinic, one of the premier healthcare institutions in the world, established a groundbreaking program to tackle healthcare innovation. “What we’ve never had, at Mayo or anywhere else to our knowledge,” says Michael D. Brennan M.D., chairman of the program, “is a facility that can answer questions – not about a disease, a diagnostic capacity, or treatment – but a laboratory where we can examine how we deliver care to patients. Now we do.”
The SPARC Innovation Program opened in June, 2004. SPARC (an acronym for See, Plan, Act, Refine, Communicate) is designed to identify, develop, test and measure innovative processes for healthcare delivery through real-time experimentation in a clinical setting.
The program is much more than redesigning exam rooms and equipping them with new furniture; it is also about the process and flow of patient care. How and where patient caregiver interactions occur and how to most effectively integrate technology into the patient care experience are essential to informing the space design.
