Recent advances in big data management and data collection technology have brought us to the edge of a technical revolution in medicine. New technologies in imaging and other diagnostic areas allow us to understand the human body and its processes better than ever before, and analytic advancements help us visualize that data in ways that could help us personalize therapies and change the face of medicine as we know it.
As an academic medical center, we are singularly poised to take on the big problems in health. Our researchers have direct access to patients. Our patients benefit from the very latest treatments, technologies, and processes. And our students and teaching faculty are working and studying at the forefront of biomedical innovation.
At the same time, medicine has become more and more fractured by infrastructural barriers and red tape. Patients are losing access to care, inventions grow stale awaiting clinical trial, drugs that are not financially viable to investors go unfunded and unresearched.
To break through these barriers, we must re-imagine the patient experience, bring design thinking principles to medicine, streamline our operational processes, rethink current policies, and create incentives for work that moves us toward the goal of better health outcomes for the people we serve.
Plans
Invest in cross-disciplinary, cutting-edge cores and technology
- Invest in technology and expertise at our research cores (e.g. informatics and imaging)
- Build a laboratory for new technologies into the HSRB-II concept
Provide better access to data
- Enhance biostatistical support services and tools we offer
Aligned planning processes
- Initiate and complete a master space plan
- Align SOM planning with the university’s One Emory plan, Woodruff Health Sciences Center’s strategic plan, 2O36 The Future Starts Here campaign and those of our health care partners
Enabling a focus on mission
- Evaluate and develop recommendations to address tensions between clinical productivity and academic activities; adopt a research and education friendly culture
- Work collaboratively with the university to identify improvement opportunities and infuse a service/solution-oriented mindset into research administrative units, including OTT, RAS, IACUC, and IRB
Lean management/administrative efficiencies
- Create alignment with EHC Lean implementation by identifying areas of waste
- Continue implementing CQI processes
What we’re doing
- Throughout 2020, we safely continued the largest research building at Emory to date - the Health Sciences Research Building (HSRB) II, set to open in Winter 2022. HSRB-II will include substantial investments for core functions including advanced imaging, flow cytometry, a biorepository and genomics.
- We are supporting and leading WHSC strategic initiatives in data science
- We are undergoing a master facilities planning project to ensure our space is keeping up with our science. SOM has engaged Payette, an external consulting firm, to facilitate a SOM Master Space Plan which includes multi-year programmatic and infrastructure plans for both the research and education missions. The purpose of this plan is to create the highest efficiency of current space usage while planning for future space needs across all SOM space, on and off-campus. In order to increase its eminent status, SOM recognizes its need to better understand its full space portfolio and current usage to create a framework to support the current and projected future trends of education and research outlined in the Emory SOM Strategic Plan.
- The SOM Leadership team also supports the new Emory Musculoskeletal (MSK) Institute building. MSK includes a high-tech patient experience and care innovation along with animal research infrastructure to support orthopaedic research.
- Fostering excellence in health care and medicine, transforming students' educational experiences and creating opportunities for groundbreaking research through the 2O36 The Future Starts Now campaign.