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University/Fairview partnership is healthy for all Minnesota
State's future residents will benefit from today's investments.
By Jakub Tolar
December 18, 2023 at 12:00AM
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In recent months, much has been made about the academic support Fairview Health Services provides to the University of Minnesota and whether it delivers enough value for the cost to Fairview's bottom line. But these investments cannot be judged through financial reporting alone. In fact, the return is much bigger. They provide immediate benefits to M Health Fairview patients, but they also ensure the future of all Minnesotans is a healthy and much better one in ways that only our public academic health system can provide.
When the M Health Fairview Joint Operating Agreement was negotiated in 2018, the university and Fairview agreed to a 1% annual expenditure from Fairview's nearly $7 billion budget — determined to be a sound and wise investment by Fairview's leadership and board of directors. Currently, the support amounts to nearly $100 million a year. In exchange, Fairview receives huge reputational and brand benefits from the "block M" and an academic medical center that innovates leading-edge treatments and care in support of Fairview's stated mission "to heal, discover, and educate for longer, healthier lives."
We utilize this support based on a strategic plan developed with Fairview. Our shared goals focus on improving quality and safety of care, increasing productivity, recruiting and retaining talented faculty in high-need areas, fostering and expanding leading-edge research activities, and supporting unfunded expenses for educating our students, who go on to become Minnesota's health care workforce.
We also know that health care is a team activity, so we utilize academic support to invest in collaborative centers and programs that work across disciplines to tackle significant public health issues. Examples include:
- With the School of Public Health, the Medical School established the Center for Learning Health System Sciences, designed to decrease the time it takes for new innovations to make it into clinics and hospitals and improve outcomes for patients.
- We have developed a Translational Center for Resuscitative Trauma Care that combines trauma and emergency care statewide to improve outcomes for trauma patients in both rural and urban communities. The goal is to bolster the capacity of EMS providers no matter where they are, with unique work performed at M Health Fairview facilities.
- Our innovative work with Fairview and the state of Minnesota during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the Institute on Infectious Diseases, a university-wide collaboration developing innovative solutions to emerging infections with epidemic or pandemic potential. As an example of this powerful, cross-discipline work, in early 2020 our faculty developed an antibody test that was deployed clinically in less than a week and supported nearly 50,000 COVID tests per day in partnership with Mayo Clinic and the state. This group also continues to monitor wastewater trends to advise M Health Fairview on staffing needs as viral infections increase.
- We are investing in a Geriatric and Palliative Care Medicine program with Fairview and eight other community partners to provide age-friendly training for primary care practice sites in all health professions.
- We are supporting our well-regarded Masonic Cancer Center to ensure it continues to provide leading-edge research into cancer treatments and cures, support our excellent cancer physicians and teams, and train the next generation of oncologists, oncology surgeons and cancer researchers.
- Our academic departments also receive important reinvestments, enabling them to recruit and retain faculty that will train most of Minnesota's future health care workforce while also providing direct patient care. Meanwhile, we're renovating outdated labs and clinics on campus to support our growing faculty and research activities. Those investments have increased productivity by nearly 30% since 2019, and our quality and safety metrics for M Health Fairview are in the upper-fourth of all systems.
- Finally, we have invested in M Health Fairview's care delivery system that patients across Minnesota use to address their health needs. For example, the Medical School renovated the call room for residents who staff the East Bank hospital, a Fairview operated facility that was experiencing significant decline. We have also invested in competitive physician salaries, clinical equipment and clinical research facilities in the Fairview system.
One measure of impact for a Medical School is the productivity of research faculty and their success in competing for National Institutes of Health funding that propels innovation. During 2020 and 2021, a $16 million investment in 17 teams of faculty researchers resulted in 76 grants totaling more than $128 million by 2022 coming to Minnesota — grants worth roughly eight times our initial investment. This helped the U of M Medical School reassert our position as one of the country's premier public universities for medical research, ranking No. 8 in research expenditures.
Ultimately, though, the academic support resources invested by Fairview and the university return benefits that far exceed grant award amounts or institutional rankings. At its core, academic support ensures the university and our academic health system delivers consistently on our mission: to serve our patients as well as the public interest, to continue Minnesota's world-class health care and innovation leadership, and to meet the needs for future generations of Minnesota's workforce and the Minnesotans they will serve in virtually every Minnesota community.
Jakub Tolar is dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School and vice president for clinical affairs.
about the writer
Jakub Tolar
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