A message from Chancellor Victor J. Dzau, MD:
Working Together to Transform Medicine
I believe it is not sufficient for academic health centers to focus on providing care only to those who come through their doors. Instead, I believe we have a responsibility to be engaged in improving health through innovation, education and translation, and through community-based service-learning, increased access to care, and developing new models of effective care delivery.
In short, a new model of academic medicine is needed if U.S. academic health centers are to rise to the challenges presented by unsustainable clinical and research costs, growing medical tourism, emerging infections and global pandemics, and local and global health disparities. But success cannot be accomplished alone.
Health disparities in the U.S. and abroad are part of a cycle that can include poor access to healthcare, poor environment, poor community infrastructure, and poor economic development, as well as political and environmental strife.
Therefore solutions are not just to be found among physicians, nurses and health care workers, but among experts in medicine, health care, law, policy, education, environment, business, and government. Solutions will come from discovery, innovation, and translation and through public-private partnerships between government, industry, and academic institutions. Health disparities are a global problem and will require global solutions.
I invite you to learn more about this vision for academic health centers through my lectures and writings. More information is also available at Web sites for the Duke institutes that contribute to our pioneering effort to Transform Medicine.
I hope you will join me in this global effort to reduce health disparities and to translate discoveries for the good of all. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Victor J. Dzau, MD
