Clinical Restructuring at a Midwestern Medical School
Client Overview:The mission of this Midwestern medical school is to be a leader in enhancing the health of people through the education of skilled, compassionate, and socially responsible physicians. With two campuses serving diverse rural and urban populations, this client is dedicated to preeminent primary care medicine, exemplary specialty care, and innovative research.
The Challenge:
This medical school is engaged in a dramatic revisioning of lifelong medical education based on the Accreditation Council for Graduated Medical Education’s six general competencies:
- Patient care
- Medical knowledge
- Practice-based learning and improvement
- Interpersonal & communication skills
- Professionalism
- Systems-based practice
As a part of this revisioning, The Bard Group was engaged by the dean and the CEO of its faculty practice organization, to assess one of the school’s diagnostic and treatment departments.
The Solution:
We reviewed in detail clinical, research, and teaching functions, and discovered crucial shortcomings in
- Service delivery
- Clinical productivity
- Quality improvement programs
- Faculty performance
- Compensation
- Speciality expertise definitions
We also uncovered dissatisfaction with the level and quality of faculty participation in teaching and supervision, and with the department’s support of undergraduate and continuing medical education.
The program needed a way to assess faculty contributions to the department’s educational mission. Our assessment of research activities revealed several areas where fellowship programs were needed but lacking, or were too small.
Successfully expanding clinical, translational, and basic research required:
- Collaboration with other university departments and private sector partners
- Improvements in recruitment, support, and retention of both research leaders and young investigators
We designed a plan to identify steps that could be taken immediately, and to develop a three- to five-year program to further enhance the department’s performance.
The Impact:
As a result of our assessment of existing systems, the client has a real-world implementation plan for clinical restructuring, process improvement. In addition, it has achieved better integration of education and research with the clinical program.
The Bard Group is now providing implementation support to the medical school as it carries out these changes.