A big challenge facing academic medical centers is how to maintain a focus on patient care in an artificially divided environment.

Most academic medical centers were developed in a system with abundant resources, cost-based reimbursement, and a traditional academic departmental structure. This led to individual departments growing as microsystems formed around particular specialties.

The untoward effect of this is that the different silos within the system tend to operate with their own success in mind, rather than the success of the enterprise as a whole. Department chairs strive to build their own empires and secure shared resources before other departments gobble them up.

So does this ultimately help or hinder an organization’s ability to deliver optimal patient care?

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