The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Medicine is the anchoring institution for an exciting new endeavor in which a dozen of Kansas City’s health care institutions that coexist in an area known as Hospital Hill (just south of downtown Kansas City) have agreed to align as the UMKC Health Sciences District.
The leaders of these institutions gathered on May 19, 2017 for the formal announcement of plans to develop the UMKC Health Sciences District as an innovative enterprise that brings together a university with local, county, and state health care organizations.
These organizations include the University of Missouri-Kansas City and its schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Studies, Pharmacy, and Dentistry; Truman Medical Centers and University Health; Children’s Mercy Hospital; the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department; the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s Center for Behavioral Medicine; the Jackson County Medical Examiner; Diastole Scholars’ Center; and the Ronald McDonald House of Kansas City.
The collective efforts of these health care institutions will stimulate new opportunities for biomedical research, health professions education, community initiatives, and innovative approaches to the well-being of the more than 16,000 individuals who come every day to work and learn in the Health Sciences District. And it will make UMKC School of Medicine an even stronger academic institution and a better partner to Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City, the Kansas City Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Research Medical Center, all long-time affiliates.
An academic health center generates value by fostering a culture of learning and inquiry, by creating feedback loops to use what is learned in the scientific laboratory to advance health and health care, by providing that health care to the sickest patients with the most complex illnesses and to society’s most vulnerable individuals, and by educating the next generation of health care professionals to ensure an adequate workforce well into the future. All of these essential endeavors require health care professionals and biomedical scientists who work in highly-functioning, multidisciplinary, multi-professional teams. UMKC Health Sciences District will be a catalyst for developing the most effective teams through an intentional process of collaboration and shared initiatives.
Furthermore, the District has the potential to help attract new talent to the Kansas City region, recruit high-caliber clinician-scientists, move discoveries to the marketplace, develop new approaches to interprofessional education, create jobs, stimulate economic growth, create shared opportunities around employee health and wellness, and coordinate parking, transportation, and security services.
UMKC Health Sciences District will pursue a mission based on the core goals of “Vital Directions for Health and Health Care,” an initiative recently launched by the National Academy of Medicine. The core goals are better health and well-being, high-value health care, and strong science and technology. The District will add health advocacy to fully leverage and integrate its significant expertise in public health, population health, and community health.
Academic health centers create social structures to catalyze communication and intellectual cross-fertilization (e.g., interdisciplinary research conferences, learning communities that comingle professions and disciplines to leverage shared knowledge, multi-professional clinical teams) and physical structures that bring people together to stimulate conversation and new ideas (pedestrian bridges, shortcuts, and walking paths). The institutions that compose the Health Sciences District all exist on a single, walkable campus and, thus, are ideally-situated to pursue these opportunities.
Robert Brook, in his book published by the RAND Corporation in 2015, Redefining Health Care Systems, wrote about three models for producing health: the medical model (i.e., elements of the current health care system including health care professionals, hospitals, long-term care facilities), the public health model (i.e., food and water safety, preventing and controlling epidemics and pandemics, disaster preparedness), and the social determinants of health model (i.e., the effect on health of education, wealth, social status, and other social factors). UMKC Health Sciences District brings together a set of institutions that collectively possess the expertise and resources to integrate all three models for producing health and to apply them in creative and innovative ways to improve health and health care in Kansas City and beyond.
Biography
Steven L. Kanter, MD, MSMA member since 2015, is a neurosurgeon, and Dean, University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Medicine.
Contact: kantersl@umkc.edu
