Collaborative Skills Pay Off Locally, Globally
You may ask why Aesculapius and his daughter Panacea appear on our cover and on this page, wearing robes adorned with continents of the globe. It is not because I believe we are close to any fabled panaceas in health care. The answer comes from my reading this spring of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. In the book, he reasons that the nature of competition has been changed dramatically by the confluence of fiber optics, document-sharing software, and changing political and economic landscapes. He argues that competition is no longer based on price or quality, but rather on who best uses collaboration—made possible by these changes—to innovate in creative ways. Collaboration is not a panacea for creating positive change, but it could be a universal starting point for accelerating our slow march toward global equity in health care.
In the next few pages and in the material contained later in this report, you will discover numerous examples of ways in which the Harvard Medical community has seized this collaborative opportunity to become quite adept at forging innovative relationships that cross disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries. In doing so, we are making significant strides in advancing our mission:
Education Four new degree tracks were launched in the fall of 2006:
Also this fall we celebrated one of our longest-standing education collaborations. The Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program held its 35th anniversary of training one fifth of our MD class jointly at MIT and HMS. Nearly 80 percent of the graduates of this rigorous program pursue careers in academic medicine. Our entire MD educational program has been undergoing a major curriculum evaluation and reform over the last several years. One of the significant innovations has been the introduction of the Principal Clinical Experience, which relies heavily on collaboration that crosses disciplinary lines. This new PCE will start toward the end of the second year and continue through much of the third year. It will encompass the traditional core clerkships, but will do so within a single institution. Pilot programs are under way at Cambridge Health Alliance, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where educational leaders from surgery, medicine, pediatrics, and Ob–Gyn have broken through traditionally high departmental silos to develop a more integrated clinical experience for our students (page 11). Faculty at Mass. General began planning a similar pilot during the 2005 school year. This new clinical education program will not roll out for the full class until 2008. Students entering in August 2006, however, will begin on a new unfolding curricular track. A two-week Introduction to the Profession course is being designed to highlight professionalism and responsibility, the scientific approach to medicine, and the importance of teamwork and collaboration. Following that introduction they will enter Fundamentals of Medicine, which will teach the basic- and social-science underpinnings of medicine in somewhat less than the traditional two years and with more integration across the biological, clinical, behavioral, and social sciences. The power of intranet technology is being demonstrated daily within the teaching modules of the current curriculum, permitting our students to view and hear virtually their entire curriculum, including taped lectures, online. The portal for this material, MyCourses, is visited more than 18,000 times each day by students and faculty.
Research Numerous cross-institutional collaborative research programs continue to thrive and draw increasing internal and external support:
Perhaps the ultimate opportunity for collaboration is Harvard’s plan for a new campus in Allston, with the early phase focused on science. Our faculty are actively engaged in the planning process to determine which areas of science could be most accelerated by co-locating researchers from the various Harvard campuses at this new site. The architect for the first building is scheduled to be selected in January 2006. OutreachUp to this point, all this is very exciting, but does not necessarily explain the global garb of Aesculapius and his daughter. I have painted the Harvard Medical community as a network, much like a neural network, reaching around the Longwood Medical Area, downtown to affiliates there, and across the Charles River to several collaborators there. But our network has a significant and growing number of nodes in other countries. The HMS Division of AIDS is working at 10 sites, including three in Asia, three in the Caribbean, and four in Africa. The Department of Social Medicine has 15 projects involving collaborators in 11 countries, and our Harvard Health Publications group has its newsletters translated into Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish. Its partnership with Newsweek reaches 20 million readers in the United States and millions more through foreign-language editions. Our greatest global reach is through Harvard Medical International. This consulting division of the School has just completed its 10th year and has 40 programs under way in 22 countries. More than 200 HMS faculty members have participated in projects focusing on medical curriculum reform, continuing medical education, and the implementation of quality-improvement systems. Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai, India, is a great example of HMI’s quality and safety initiatives. HMI has worked with Wockhardt since the opening of this hospital to institute global benchmarks, launch training programs for staff, and establish mechanisms to track progress and identify problems. Recently, the Joint Commission International accredited the hospital, distinguishing Wockhardt as only the second hospital in India to earn this distinction. In its most ambitious project to date, HMI and its partner Dubai Healthcare City are scheduled to break ground in the coming year for the Harvard Medical School Dubai Center, Institute for Postgraduate Education and Research. The center is expected to be a magnet for education and research throughout the Persian Gulf, North Africa, and the Middle East. HMI is already well under way with an ancillary aspect of the partnership, establishing the licensing and credentialing criteria for all health care providers who plan to practice in Dubai Healthcare City, which is currently under construction. The vision for HMI, articulated by its president Robert Crone, is that “no citizen of the world should need to leave his or her own community to access high-quality health care.” This goal of “one world, one medicine” is why we have given Aesculapius and Panacea their global-patterned robes, and I hope that after reading this report, you will agree that we have accelerated the pace toward that goal.
Copyright 2006 The President and Fellows of Harvard College |