Mayo Clinic 4+

Navigating the Mayo system

I love Mayo and we have been with it since we lived in Minnesota. But once we moved to Scottsdale we could not move our primary care doctor here to Mayo in that we were over 65. That was a low blow after being with Mayo in Rochester and having all of our medical care there for years. The other thing I find is that the Mayo system is difficult to navigate. Until you’re the one doing all of the navigating you don’t realize the difficulty involved. Because they do not take Medicare you have to pay the bills and never seem to match the payment schedule and so I put an XL spreadsheet together and put took it to the finance department. He told me that it is impossible to use the spreadsheet to figure out pay and even he had difficulty explaining it to me. That being said I still think it’s the finest medical facility in Arizona but it certainly is difficult to navigate. On the website I find that if you request a response from the medical team you will get a quick response. I also find they telemedicine more and not being able to meet with doctors. I also find that PAs and MPs are meeting with you rather than doctors more often. I find them taking extraordinary Covid precautions and felt very safe once I got into the facility.

Some features great and others poor

This app is very handy and i use it frequently. Like adding appointments to calendar feature. But both website and app neglect the ability to pay by visit selectively. This means bills get much later payment while some are pending on insurance payments...this is bad for Mayo cashflow.

I might add that each time I have called and paid by specific visits the Mayo clerk agrees that they get many callers requesting to pay in this manner yet nothing has been done about it. One would think that the operating costs associated with phone support for billing in this manner (many times it can be 10+ minutes) would easily justify the changes to incorporated it. For example the website already lists the bills by visit number yet it does not provide the means to pay them individually. So this is just not an app problem.

I suspect the problem is that they do accounting of charges and credits by an account and not by individual bills to an account. But since they go through the effort to address bills individually they should have the means to implement payment by bill(visits).

Developer Response ,

Matenai - thanks for the kind words about the app. I’ve passed your feedback along to our billing area so they can consider improving that experience for users in the future. If you think of anything else we can do better - feel free to drop us a note. Our email is mcmobileapps@mayo.edu. Thanks so much.

Good start but needs work!

Sometimes it opens, often it doesn’t. As I am legally blind, it’s hard for me to read the info. In particular, the patient number is written SO small I have to give it to others to ask them to read it. (So much for patient confidentiality- I’d rather they just leave it so I can enlarge it. (I need minimum font size 14 to read but normally use 18 to avoid strain- I believe yours is about 8). Color change would help as well. I can change my iPad to go white on black nos like this note, but cannot change the app background. These things have caused great issue problems for me including overpayment by me which Mayo Clinic still has not resolved. If I had been able to read the note, it would have been avoided completely. Set up doesn’t allow for patients to put their own notes - something which would allow better exchange with doctors as things come up between visits, it also (like most medical portals) doesn’t allow for information exchange by the patient with other non-mayo doctors. Until doctors demand that portals be able to exchange info, medical treatment in this country will continue to erode. You are in a good position to do so. Use the reputation of Mayo Clinic under the Mayo brothers and demand better for your patients!