For each of the past four years, Mayo Clinic has reported that 1.3 million patients visited one of its sites.

That’s an important number, and seen in the context of the Destination Medical Center push, it can lead to some important questions. Shouldn’t a bigger, better clinic with a better, more accessible downtown attract more patients? Why isn’t that happening? How can this problem be fixed, and when can we expect patient numbers to begin rising?

People who dislike the public-private partnership that is DMC will no doubt take satisfaction in what they will call “stagnation” at Mayo, but as is so often true, the numbers (and the comparisons they invite) actually mean little without full context.

For example, we don’t actually know if the Rochester campus is treating more or fewer patients than it saw a few years ago, because Mayo doesn’t give the public that information. The 1.3 million patients seen each year includes Mayo’s campuses in Rochester, Florida and Arizona, and it’s entirely possible that one site is seeing fewer patients while another is seeing more.

With everything that the Rochester campus offers, we have no difficulty believing that people for whom proximity is of little concern are increasingly likely to come to Minnesota, rather than Scottsdale or Jacksonville.

Furthermore, the 1.3 million patients seen in 2018 accounted for 4.7 million visits to Mayo sites. While the number of people Mayo is seeing has been flat for a half-decade, the number of visits they make has been growing by 1.5 percent each year since 2009.

What does that mean? It means that Mayo’s customer base today includes more patients with complex health conditions than it did just a few years ago. Mayo has always been willing to take on the most challenging cases, and that’s never been more true.

Furthermore, while Mayo’s patient list hasn’t been growing, its annual patient-care revenue grew 17 percent from 2014-17, and the clinic has added more than 5,000 employees in Rochester since 2013.

Those are amazing figures, especially in light of the fact that during that six-year span, our nation’s Medicare population grew by an average of 1.5 million each year.

Medical providers that accept Medicare patients — and Mayo Clinic does — are paid less than what they receive from non-Medicare patients. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reports that for the past three years, the nation’s 291 most-efficient hospitals (which outperformed 1,800 other hospitals) had average margins of -2 percent for their Medicare patients.

We don’t have enough information to conclude that Mayo Clinic has figured out a way to at least break even on its Medicare patients, but given the clinic’s revenue growth and soaring employment during the past five years, we can safely state that Mayo has figured out efficiencies and systems that other providers have not.

Bottom line? We’re convinced that the DMC initiative is bringing and will continue to bring more people to Rochester — more patients, more doctors, more support staff, more researchers and more entrepreneurs.

Growth in all of these areas will not be equal, nor will they proceed at similar, predictable speeds — but the growth will happen.

— Rochester Post-Bulletin