How Academic Health Systems Can Be Ready for the Next Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges for academic health systems (AHSs) across their tripartite mission of providing clinical care, conducting research, and educating learners. Despite these challenges, AHSs played an invaluable role in responding to the pandemic. Clinicians worked tirelessly to care for patients, and institutions quickly reoriented their care delivery systems. Furthermore, AHSs played an important role in advancing science, launching studies and clinical trials to examine new vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. However, there is room for improvement; AHSs can use lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to reshape their operations for the future. To prepare for the next pandemic, AHSs must modernize, adapt, and transform their clinical operations, research infrastructure, and educational programs to include public health and to build surveillance capacity for detecting, monitoring, and managing emerging outbreaks. In this Invited Commentary, the authors describe the opportunities AHSs have to build on their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways they can take advantage of their unique strengths in each of their 3 mission areas. Within clinical care, AHSs can reach patients outside traditional clinical settings, build national and regional networks, advance data-driven insights, engage with the community, and support and protect the workforce. Within research, they can leverage data science and artificial intelligence, perform pandemic forecasting, leverage the social and behavioral sciences, conduct clinical trials, and build a research and development preparedness and operational plan. Within education, AHSs can promote remote learning, make interprofessional learning the norm, and build a system of continuing education.

Fostering innovation in medicine and health care: what must academic health centers do?

There is a real need for innovation in health care delivery, as well as in medicine, to address related challenges of access, quality, and affordability through new and creative approaches. Health care environments must foster innovation, not just allowing it but actively encouraging it to happen anywhere and at every level in health care and medicine-from the laboratory, to the operating room, bedside, and clinics. This paper reviews the essential elements and environmental factors important for health-related innovation to flourish in academic health systems.The authors maintain that innovation must be actively cultivated by teaching it, creating "space" for and supporting it, and providing opportunities for its implementation. The authors seek to show the importance of these three fundamental principles and how they can be implemented, highlighting examples from across the country and their own institution.Health innovation cannot be relegated to a second-class status by the urgency of day-to-day operations, patient care, and the requirements of traditional research. Innovation needs to be elevated to a committed endeavor and become a part of an organization's culture, particularly in academic health centers.