Q. Michael, can you talk about the URMC and what makes it unique?
Michael: We’re actually even more unique than most academic medical centers left in the country these days in the sense that our health system is still truly fully integrated into our university.
What that means is the budget on the health system side rolls up to the budget of the university. Most academic health systems, today, are no longer fully integrated with their parent university in that they have broken off from the parent university. On the health system side, we tend to make money but on the academic side, it’s much harder to do so. The health system then, ends up subsidizing and sending a lot of their margins over to the college to help support those missions.
A lot of academic medical centers said, “Hey! If we broke away from our parent university, it’s going to be easier for us to obtain our 1-2% annual margins per year that we’re trying to achieve.” At the University of Rochester, we have made the conscious decision that we are not breaking away from our parent university and we actually leverage that as a differentiator for us.
When we think about digital health and digital transformation, I have access to some of the most brilliant engineers, computer scientists, data scientists, business faculty in the country. I have access to even the faculty from our music school. I can apply that expertise and capacity to solving some of the most difficult problems in our health system. I can leverage that expertise to build, create, and deploy new technology solutions into our ecosystem. It’s a unique place and I love it.
