Dear Members of the HMS and HSDM Community:

Primary care is the foundation of health care and holds the key to keeping people healthy and connecting them to the full spectrum of needed care. Recognizing its critical importance, Harvard Medical School launched the Center for Primary Care in 2010 as a platform for promoting primary care education, research, and delivery systems. The center was made possible thanks to a generous $30 million current-use gift from an anonymous donor, together with input from members of the HMS community, including many students.

For 15 years, the center has benefited from the visionary leadership of Director Russell Phillips, the William Applebaum Professor of Medicine, and his dedicated team of faculty, staff, and students. Together they have raised the profile of primary care at HMS, engaged and nurtured a passionate community of students, and allowed educational opportunities at HMS to flourish.

Over the last several years, Dr. Phillips and I have tried in earnest to raise additional philanthropic and endowment funds to sustain the center as an entity with its own administrative and research infrastructure. This has proven difficult, and the current financial realities have necessitated a strategic restructuring to sustain the center’s several most successful programs. Below I outline a strategy to integrate our primary care curricular offerings into existing educational and translational research programs.

To align our educational goals and to reinforce the School’s support for and leadership in primary care, we will embed the educational offerings into our Program in Medical Education (PME). This integration will allow for greater coordination between the primary care core clerkship required of all medical students, the new pilot curriculum track for medical students dedicated to primary care leadership and transformation, and other primary care-focused educational initiatives. Opportunities for primary care research will be supported through the HMS Office of Scholarly Engagement, and the Primary Care Student Leadership Committee will continue as an important forum for innovation and engagement within our community.

The Office for Community-Centered Medical Education, which oversees a growing catalog of opportunities for students to engage in community health, will also become part of the PME. The OCCME is already deeply engaged with students, providing opportunities to learn about the community perspective beginning the first week of medical and dental school. Through collaborations with community-based organizations, the office helps ensure that students appreciate the needs of our neighbors in Boston and surrounding municipalities and facilitates student involvement in community-centered scholarly projects.

As Harvard’s teaching hospitals seek to strengthen the provision of primary care to patients across the broader community, this reorganization will allow HMS to identify optimal learning opportunities for our medical students in primary care settings.

Beyond the PME, the highly successful HMS HealthTech Fellowship Program will move to the Therapeutics Initiative. This 10-month training program teaches the biodesign innovation framework and prepares the next generation of health care innovators to set new standards in care through technology, engineering, business, and science. Additionally, the recently launched Lancet Global Health Commission on People-Centered Care for Universal Health Coverage will now be supported by the Office for Research Initiatives and Global Programs.

The changes detailed above will be effective June 30. I invite you to read this news story for more details about the transition.

I want to acknowledge the dedication of all those associated with the center and its progress, and give special thanks to Russ Phillips, whose vision and leadership built a community and laid the foundation for primary care programming that will continue to engage and teach future generations of medical students.

I am confident that this transition will reinforce and sustain HMS’ commitment to primary care well into the future.

Sincerely,

George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University