A Healthy Outlook At Mayo Clinic

In-plants at health care organizations, like Mayo Clinic, feel that their work is helping to save lives.

Story by Mike Llewellyn

"You can feel extremely good about working here," says Claire Metzler, supervisor of the in-plant at Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn.

And with good reason. Mayo Clinic is one of the most respected names in health care, priding itself on its compassionate patient care and best known for its cancer treatments and organ transplants.

Likewise, Mayo Clinic's in-plant is a standout in its own industry, with 27 employees and a full range of services, extending even to Web-based job submission and data center printing.

Operating one of the largest in-plants in the health care field has kept Metzler quite busy.

"It's been a dramatic year," she says. A merger with Mayo's data center brought a flood of new work into the shop. Plus, Metzler recently brought two other hospital print shops under the in-plant umbrella.

"We've printed 72 percent of Mayo Rochester printing requests," she says. "We have more requests than we can handle even with overtime."

In fact, Metzler says the biggest challenge facing her in-plant is to consistently meet this high demand with high quality.

Fighting Through A Tough Year

"The challenge is how do you work your present staff and equipment to be extremely productive? It's a very tender balance," says Metzler, explaining that the faltering economy has also forced the work volume decidedly upward.

"After the World Trade Center tragedy, people value 'free' printing much more greatly than they did in good years," she says. "In good years people aren't as worried about their bottom line."

Metzler says her shop is in what's called an "expense management year," which requires her to monitor equipment purchases very carefully.

"I haven't purchased any equipment over $5,000 for over a year," she says.

Metzler says many health care organizations faced a lean year. To help Mayo Clinic through the tough times, she offers customers cost-saving tips, like printing with two colors instead of four. Since all of the in-plant's offset presses—a MAN Roland, a Heidelberg GTO and an A.B.Dick 9870—are two-color models, this has helped the shop, as well.

Digital Printing: A Natural Focus

The Mayo Clinic, like all health care organizations, focuses on the needs of each individual patient. For the in-plant, this translates into an emphasis on variable data printing. The data center merge was just the beginning.

"The data center wanted to get out of print. Their print was declining because so many people were working online," says Metzler. "Now the data center is focused primarily on disaster recovery. And when I came in, there was just one Xerox variable printer installed."

Metzler says that since the merge, she has upgraded from the older digital printer to a Xerox 6135 and a Xerox 6180, which print 135 and 180 ppm respectively. They have become two of the busiest devices in the shop.

To get jobs into the shop more efficiently, Metzler says she and one of her Web developers put together the shop's online job submission system in-house.

"It's called 'E-Ticket.' We have a print shop home page, and everybody's home page is set up to access the Web-based ordering system," she says.

Spanning The Country

Mayo Clinic is part of Mayo Foundation, a charitable, not-for-profit organization. It operates three large campuses in the United States: in Rochester, Minn., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Jacksonville, Fla. Since the in-plant merged with the data center, Metzler says her shop now handles payroll for all three locations. And with 28,000 employees in Rochester alone (compared to a total city population of 54,000), payroll is one of the mainstays of Metzler's facility.

With patient education making up 40 percent of her shop's output, Metzler says it's essential to have variable output capability at the ready. For example, she explains, Minnesota law requires that patients be asked in writing if their medical records may be used for research. It's a little legal detail that has meant large orders for the shop, as the in-plant now prints thousands of these "permission slips" unique to each patient.

Additionally, the shop produces a two-color, watermarked "request for contribution" package for each patient.

Another 30 percent of the in-plant's printing is devoted to its employees, and a large part of this, says Metzler, is education.

"There's a lot of educational areas—continuing medical education departments, continuing nursing education departments, and we print many, many course books for them," she elaborates.

To do that, the in-plant has charged a Canon color printer with producing the books' covers, while the Xerox 6180 produces all of the contents.

A Unique Revenue Structure

Metzler says her in-plant is set up in such a way that her customers don't actually have to pay for the cost of the printing. All of the in-plant's costs are forwarded to a large fund, which is then divided annually by the accounting department.

"I still have to very carefully budget," says Metzler. "People say our printing is 'free,' but it's not free, it's just not divvied down to individual departments. But we are accountable, and I don't have free reign."

Overall, Metzler says, working at a health care in-plant has been a satisfying experience.

"There's more of a mind-set that what we are printing aids in saving lives, versus a commercial print shop whose primary goal is to make money," Metzler says.