Sustaining world-class research amid margin pressures requires sharper focus and strategic recruitment, academic health system leaders told Becker’s.
To balance the financial demands of maintaining research excellence with the immediate needs of community hospitals and patients, leaders said they are doubling down on programs that emphasize clinical strengths and where funding is more likely to be sustainable.
At Gainesville, Fla.-based UF Health, clinical care is best delivered when innovation, education and research are woven into daily work — a principle that remains core to the system’s mission, President and System CEO Stephen Motew, MD, told Becker’s.
“Communities have come to rely on this level of care from UF Health,” Dr. Motew said. “And as such, despite the complexities and risks to established research funding, we are addressing these by focusing recruitment on top academic talent where funding is more likely to be sustainable, by establishing a broader lens of funding partners across industry, federal and state sources, and with more strategic use of philanthropy.”
He added that discipline and community engagement are key to sustaining this model.
“It is critical for our success that we remain disciplined in our costs and aggressively improve processes across all missions and lean-in to embedding UF Health deeper into the community, not retreating,” Dr. Motew said.
Balancing these priorities also means recognizing the two are financially entwined. The flow of funding for research is often supplemented by margins generated from patient care, said Andrew DeVoe, executive vice president and CFO of Burlington, Mass.-based Tufts Medicine.
“Our focus has been on achieving profitability so we can invest more in world-class research,” Mr. DeVoe said. “Significant focus is spent on commercial funding as a stopgap, not only today but into the future.”
At Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare, research helps the organization be “the best at getting better,” Chief Academic Officer Peter Yoo, MD, said. To sustain this commitment amid industrywide pressures, the system is “laser-focused” on what is most worthy of its attention: programs that highlight or build on clinical strengths.
“This ensures we are doubling down on what matters most to patients and communities,” Dr. Yoo said. “We have to be disciplined with our limited resources, and research doesn’t detract from front-line care but must augment it. Our research initiatives are cost-conscious, clinically relevant and sustainable. By careful recruiting and mentoring colleagues to secure private grants and funding, we shift the balance from internal subsidy to external investment.”
Hartford HealthCare has diversified its research portfolio and accelerated the translation of innovation into patient care through engaging innovators who bring new products and early technologies for exploration and development, Dr. Yoo said.
“An example of this work is our Holistic Artificial Intelligence in Medicine collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through which we are pioneering multimodal clinical AI tools that sharpen diagnosis, personalize care and streamline hospital operations,” he said.
