Harvard Medicine

As we all get back into gear after the holiday break, I wanted to share with you some more detailed information about the strategic planning teams and their works-in-progress. For those of you new to this site, the list of planning advisory teams and their members can be found here. I am very grateful to all the members of the teams, and particularly to the team leaders, for all their efforts in support of the School.

The goals for the process are listed here. Briefly, the Biomedical Research and the Social Science and Global Health teams have the very broad responsibility of analyzing the areas of teaching and research where Harvard Medical School already excels and identifying new opportunities for the School to distinguish itself by optimizing current and prospective resources. It is probably too early to make public the initial thinking of these groups, and I will save that for a later update.

The teams focused on Education and on Tools and Technologies have made considerable progress already, however, and I would like to give you a sense of how they are approaching their tasks. I stress that this is an interim update, and that none of the potential recommendations I list below as emerging from these teams should be viewed as final. I welcome your comments, which can be submitted here; comments will be posted to the discussion section of this site. I am particularly interested in suggestions about major areas in teaching and research that may appear to be missing from the teams’ initial deliberations.

The Strategic Advisory Group on Education, appropriately abbreviated to SAGE, has divided itself into five subcommittees, each addressing one of the following areas:

The education of physician-investigators and scholarly physicians;
International teaching collaborations;
The continuum of education across the University, including basic, clinical, and translational research training;
Education at the Harvard-affiliated hospitals; and
Mentoring and faculty development of educators, and enhancement of a culture of teaching.

I will not attempt to summarize all of the extensive work already done by the SAGE subgroups, but some emerging possible recommendations include:

To enhance the training of physician-investigators and scholarly physicians by expanding the MD-PhD program, requiring medical students to pursue an in-depth scholarly project, and fostering discovery-based learning throughout the medical curriculum.
To increase the engagement of HMS and the affiliated institutions in all aspects of global health, including local and distance education programs and partnerships, research collaborations, and healthcare delivery.
To provide a continuum of education across HMS, Harvard University, and the affiliated institutions in basic, clinical, and translational research training.
To create infrastructure and programs that guide, support, and reward educators at all levels (faculty, trainees, students), and that facilitate the development of a culture of teaching in graduate and medical training at HMS and the affiliated institutions.
To reduce the debt burden on medical students and to enhance engagement in priority areas (biomedical investigation, healthcare disparities, global health) by targeted loan-forgiveness programs.
To increase diversity in all aspects of HMS education.
To continually assess and evaluate current educational programs and to develop and implement novel approaches to medical, graduate, and postgraduate education.

One of the more nebulous — yet important — challenges taken on by the SAGE team is the question of how to encourage a culture of teaching throughout the School. I will look to this team to offer concrete suggestions on how to increase the incentives for excellence in teaching, as well as suggestions on how to support faculty in improving the quality of their teaching efforts.

The Tools and Technologies advisory group (TNT) is addressing the question of how to better organize the HMS faculty — across all institutions — to enhance discovery and development of emerging technologies and to harness them for teaching and biomedical research. Technology development can be divided into three phases: discovery; development; and dissemination, the point at which service facilities may become possible. The team is working to identify areas where HMS currently is competitive and new areas where the School can distinguish itself. Because the challenges may be different in different scientific areas, the TNT team has initially divided into five subgroups:

Bioinformatics, statistics, and computation;
Small molecules and therapeutics;
Genomics and proteomics;
Bioengineering, functional imaging, cellular and molecular imaging; and
Molecular, animal, and human physiology.

Each subgroup is addressing the following set of questions:

What are the unmet needs in the Harvard medical community, on all three levels: frontier research, development/dissemination, and cores?
Is there a need to inventory existing facilities and interest groups? What strategy would be effective?
Is progress in this area inhibited by regulatory and oversight issues? If so, what needs to be done?
What are the barriers to communication and collaboration?
How should the community in this area be defined, and what is the scale on which collaboration is effective?
What issues arise with respect to personnel (e.g. promotion criteria, staff funding)?

The full team will reconvene shortly and regroup to tackle the organizational issues that emerge.

Some emerging possible recommendations include:

A Standing Committee focused on recruitments to bring new technologies to HMS. The Dean might create a committee on technological innovation with the responsibility of identifying potential faculty recruits in novel technology areas. This committee could facilitate such recruitments in both Quad and Hospital departments;
An Office of Tools/Technologies/Facilities. HMS Central Administration could house an office that might perform a number of functions, including: (1) collecting information on current and future needs for facilities; (2) tracking existing resources and informing the HMS community of their existence and pricing structure; (3) using peer review to determine the level of subsidy offered to facilities; and (4) providing an online manual featuring best-practice research techniques and relevant locations.

One salient point that emerged from the Steering Committee discussion of the initial report of the TNT team was that excellence at the service level is rarely possible in the absence of faculty working at the technology discovery level. I will look to this team to advise me on whether we value technology-focused faculty appropriately, and if not, how we could improve.

I hope you have found this snapshot of the efforts of two of our teams interesting and informative, even though the possible recommendations are a work-in-progress and therefore necessarily incomplete and possibly premature. Once again, I encourage you to submit your comments to the comments site.

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HMS Strategic Planning

JANUARY 23, 2008

Message from Dean Flier