Academic Health Centers

Academic health centers and health care reform.

There is increasing support for the proposition that academic health centers have a duty to accept broad responsibility for the health of their communities. The Health of the Public program has proposed that centers become directly involved in the social-political process as advocates for reform of the health care system. Such engagement raises important issues about the roles and responsibilit...

Current challenges to academic health centers.

Academic health centers (AHCs) have long been the exemplars of medicine in the United States. They produce “breakthrough” research, pioneer new diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, and train the best and brightest future physicians with emphasis on specialists and subspecialists. Today, they face a perilous future because the health care economic system that supports this enterprise is fad...

Academic health centers in a changing environment.

To evaluate the potential problems facing academic health centers (AHCs) as a result of market-driven health care reforms, we conducted case studies of seven nationally prominent AHCs during 1994. Findings suggest that although AHCs were not yet feeling the predicted impact of competition on their financial health and ability to sustain their academic missions of teaching, research, and care of...

Clinical service standards at academic health centers.

OBJECTIVE To describe the content and variability for clinical service standards related to quality of care among a convenience sample of academic health centers. DESIGN We used the membership of the University HealthSystem Consortium, an alliance of academic health centers in the United States for clinical services, to survey electronically 53 of these centers regarding clinical service stan...

Academic health centers: a troubled future.