So if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that I went on a tour of Mayo with SWE. And I couldn’t fit all of my blog into one post, so here is the rest of it!
It was Saturday so there was no one at the clinic (I assume the Methodist Hospital and St. Mary’s were quite busy). We went into admissions and saw the process by which patients are admitted and go through the system. It was designed for efficiency. On the floor I saw, there is a central station where people who know things work that connects to three hallways of exam rooms and one waiting room. I think there is something similar on every floor. They have a system of lights for every room that indicates its status…patient waiting, doctor is in the room, etc. The doctors use pagers to communicate when they’re needed somewhere.
We then toured the engineering department which provides custom devices for the doctors, replications of scanned organs, and improvements to the processes at Mayo. They have a lot of CNC machines and use cad tools for much of their work. They fabricate a lot of metal devices, and we saw a flow jet machine as well. We saw a jaw socket that was in the process of fabrication. They also showed us a device for inserting the sensor for deep brain stimulation on a pig.
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The clinic has its own scientific glass blower, and we saw a demonstration of his work. He demonstrated blowing bulbs into cylindrical glass tubes, bending the glass into corners, and attaching glass tubes to larger glass vessels. He makes all kinds of things…the most notable of which were heart / vascular system replicas so that people could practice angioplasty surgeries.
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Tags: cad, engineering, glass, mayo, photos, Rochester, SWE, tour