After working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for nine years, Dr. Marc Patterson decided to change his life. In 2001, he moved to New York City to take a job as chief of pediatric neurology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH).
This year, Patterson returned to the Big House on the Prairie. "Sometimes I miss New York,” he acknowledges, “but working in a system that actually functions is worth it."
Let me be clear: Patterson has many good things to say about NYPH and Columbia University Medical Center, the uptown campus where the worked. “I had a great experience, and fabulous colleagues,” Patterson told me. “Moreover, one of the reasons I moved back to Minnesota is because my family is there.”
Nevertheless, Patterson says: “There is a fundamental systemic difference between Columbia and the Mayo Clinic: Columbia is a traditional academic medical center; [research] that came through the med school provided the money to pay us. The hospital is a separate entity. By contrast, at Mayo, the hospital and the medical school are one. It’s an integrated organization.”
What difference does that make?