By Neal Ungerleider
Fast Company
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.
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.
At a contentious city council meeting this past March, Rochester approved a plan to build the DMC. The project, a public-private partnership between Rochester, the Mayo Clinic, the state of Minnesota, county governments, and the private sector, would effectively remake all of Rochester in the Mayo Clinic’s image. Downtown would be rejuvenated and made more cold-weather friendly, while the Mayo Clinic would welcome gleaming new facilities. Vast plots of land would be used for fresh office space for biotech and pharmaceutical firms, local schools would get a cash injection, and development of amenities like hip restaurants and upscale shops would be subsidized by local and state government to attract out-of-town talent and medical tourists. There are even plans for a rail link to the city of Minneapolis, approximately 90 miles away.
“It isn’t clear yet what the Destination Medical Center will mean to the Twin Cities metro area,” says Leah Puffer, a Minneapolis-based urban planner. “Rochester is often seen as a peripheral city, just far enough away from Minneapolis and St. Paul that it doesn’t have the feel of a competitor. I think many individuals in the Twin Cities are still unaware of the amount of investment and potential development in Rochester as part of the Destination Medical Center. Most people still see it as a sleepy, small city with a great hospital and clinic.”
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