Boosted by a $100 million donation from the late Warren Alpert, the Alpert Medical School is embarking on a new phase of strategic growth as it aims to strengthen research ties with area hospitals and unify research administration.
The Corporation broke from its traditional routine for its February meeting and replaced some committee meetings with a full-day retreat to discuss the future of the Med School and hear from members of a planning group appointed by Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 last September to consider strategic initiatives for the Med School.
The objective of the planning group's discussion with the Corporation was to "share ideas, educate, bring up to date, seek feedback and ask for advice," said Eli Adashi, dean of medicine and biological sciences, who chaired the working group.
The Corporation made no commitments during its discussion of strategic planning with the Med School working group, Adashi said.
The strategic planning working group, which completed its work and issued a report in December, was created to look at ways to improve the Med School.
"It was good to bring together these very different perspectives on how to improve the Med School and about what's happening now - what is very good, not so good and where we can add real value," said Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president, who was a member of the planning group.
Working group member Terrie "Fox" Wetle, associate dean of public health and public policy and professor of community health, told The Herald, "It was a very exciting time to be doing strategic planning for the Med School, especially when the large Warren Alpert gift came in."
But work on the strategic plan for the Med School had been in progress for over a year and a half before the gift came in, said John Deeley, executive dean for administration for the Division of Biology and Medicine.
Before the appointment of the strategic planning working group for the Med School, Kertzer asked Adashi to create his own strategic plan for the Med School. Adashi's plan was completed in the fall of 2006.
Adashi's plan gave a clear view of the current state of the Med School's current research stature, highlighting that it is ranked 71st of 123 medical schools in National Institutes of Health grant dollars.
"A lot of strategic vision for the Medical School is about increasing the stature and rankings," said Neel Shah '04 MD'08, president of the Medical Student Senate. "Certainly from a strategic point of view, research is important, but it's usually pretty independent from students who are really here in more of a pre-professional capacity."
Building research bridgesAdashi's plan envisioned a Brown University Health Sciences Center, which would consolidate programmatic and administrative facets of its research organizations under one chief academic officer, one research dean, one research administration and one grant portfolio.
Unlike the dean's initial plan, the working group's report uses the term "Health Sciences Center" sparingly, indicating that "the term is not meant to suggest a physical entity. Rather, it is an umbrella characterization of our shared research, educational and clinical missions."
The working group articulated the need for stronger research partnerships between the Med School and its affiliated hospitals. The new research efforts would be led by a new dean for research and a single office of research administration and would support research "not just on campus but throughout the hospitals," Adashi said.
The working group's report recognizes "the significant risks to our ability to attract outstanding faculty and students, to provide excellent clinical care at the frontiers of medical science and to attract significant federal and philanthropic support if we do not move effectively to remove organizational barriers to cross-institutional collaboration."
"The most fundamental relationship between the hospitals and the Medical School is about the education of physicians. You can't have a full-fledged four-year medical school without it," Adashi said. He continued, "A big piece of the strategic plan is to complement the education partnership with a research partnership."
Currently the Med School and the hospitals are collaborating on research projects, but "operationally, we are distinct entities," Adashi told The Herald. "We lack a formal research partnership alliance."
"We're not taking full advantage of the opportunities to collaborate, for example, between hospitals and campus-based faculty, between institutions and individuals and between the life sciences and engineering," Spies said.
The report advocates that Brown and its teaching hospital partners "charge the dean with the responsibility to lead a collaborative strategic planning process to develop a shared, strategically coordinated scientific agenda that builds upon our existing scientific and clinical strengths," specifically by pouring money into selected "areas of excellence."
Deeley and Adashi both declined to speculate on what the future "areas of excellence" might be.
"We are about to send out surveys to faculty," Deeley said, adding that the division needs significant faculty input before deciding which areas deserve the most attention.
"We don't know where people will see connections. The faculty and students in the field will see the most interesting connections," Spies said.
"The good news is that the pieces are there in a lot of areas to do really exciting things, if we can connect the pieces," Spies said. "We are not starting from scratch."
Deeley said the University is already particularly strong in cancer research, genomics and biomedical engineering.
The new research dean should be "someone who gets up in the morning thinking about how to connect these pieces," Spies said. The new dean's position is to be "a full time facilitator and catalyst."
Every medical school and its affiliated hospitals have a different relationship, Adashi explained. The new dean will have to translate the words of strategic plan into a living, breathing organism unique to Brown.
"In many settings hospitals are not home to research, it's the domain of the medical school. But in our case, as with Harvard Medical School, it occurs in both," Adashi said.
A major factor in the separation between the hospitals and the Med School at Brown is the youth of the Med School. "The hospitals were here before the Med School was. ... The Medical School and the hospitals evolved in parallel and arrived at the current state of affairs," Adashi said.
University officials say the affiliated hospitals and clinical faculty are on board with the strategic plan. "The hospitals share the same goal, no question about it. All the hospitals see themselves as academic enterprises where a critical part of what they do is train physicians and conduct research," Spies said.
"Everyone has a lot of interest in seeing us do better - and most people even agree on what better looks like," Spies said. "We are a long way from what this specifically looks like and knowing if it's doable."
A new homeThe other major initiative addressed by the Med School's strategic plan is the creation of a new medical education building off College Hill. A portion of the Alpert gift has been designated by University officials to help pay for the building.
Adashi's wrote in his proposal about a Health Services Center that was "readily visible from I-95" and "anchored by a medical education institute, a learning center for Brown's medical students, residents, fellows and faculty."
The working group also advocated a new medical education building, while not going as far as Adashi's plan. Their envisioned new medical education building would house medical instruction for med students, residents, fellows and faculty and be situated near the Med School's affiliate hospitals.
The medical education building, to be located on the Rhode Island Hospital campus or in the Jewelry District, would provide a home for the Med School.
The working group report underscores the importance of such a home, as the "current lack of such a building is a competitive disadvantage and impairs student recruitment efforts and (in some cases) our fundamental ability to deliver the curriculum, given the existing on-campus space constraints."
