Academic health systems now go way beyond the hospital and traditional care sites, and growth strategies are evolving as well.
When UCLA Health acquired a shuttered shopping mall on the west side of Los Angeles, the goal was not commercial redevelopment. The 800,000-square-foot space, formerly the Westside Pavilion, is being rebuilt into research laboratories for the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy — with a UCLA quantum computing center co-located to run the artificial intelligence and large language models that will accelerate the science.
“We will be recruiting researchers from all over the world to really lead the scientific discoveries there,” Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health and CEO of the UCLA Hospital System in Los Angeles, said during a keynote interview at Becker’s CEO + CFO Roundtable. “And then in addition, the UCLA center for Quantum Physics with those big computers that run all the large language models and AI will be co-located there.”
The California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy is a public-private partnership supported by state funding, private philanthropy and UCLA. Ms. Spisso said she and her colleagues believe most diseases have an immunological basis, making the institute a potential path to faster cures across a broad range of conditions. The institution also operates 20 cancer infusion sites spread across the Los Angeles community and deploys mobile primary care vans with psychiatry to homeless encampments throughout the county.
The scope of that expansion is not coincidental. UCLA has also hired a chief AI officer for the health system and a separate one for the School of Medicine, and launched a formal research project to evaluate every AI tool implemented across the institution.
“As we would have all these ideas come in, every different tool that people wanted to use, the latest and greatest, we actually now have a project, a research project called ANOVA AI, where everything that we implement we’re looking at the full cost of conversion, cost of implementing, are we really saving money, are we really making care more efficient with it?” Ms. Spisso said. “This group will be publishing that as well to really look at the efficiency and efficacy of these tools.”
At The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Redonda Miller, MD, president of the hospital, has been extending her institution’s reach in a different direction: into schools, into AI partnerships that are reshaping how clinicians are trained, and into community programs that go well beyond acute care.
Building on a school-based health center launched at a local KIPP school in Baltimore six or seven years ago, Hopkins is expanding into three more inner-city schools, embedding nurse practitioners to provide asthma care, medication management and behavioral health support on-site.
On the AI front, Hopkins has announced a partnership with Open Evidence, an AI-driven clinical search platform, moving into agentic applications that go beyond advisory decision support.
“They can look at a patient’s chart in the hospital, take into account labs like the PTT and medications they’re on that could be contributing, and make a recommendation for clinicians on how to more precisely dose heparin,” Dr. Miller said.
The hospital’s vice dean for education has also announced a partnership with OpenAI to rethink medical training — exploring whether AI-enabled competency assessment can reshape the standard timelines of medical education.
“Can we work on competence-based outcomes and how do we know? Does everyone need four years of medical school, six years of this?” Dr. Miller said. “Or can Open Evidence help us tailor that using AI and competence training?”
UNC Health also has ties to OpenAI. The health system received a $40 million grant from the OpenAI foundation to accelerate cancer vaccine development and a $35 million grant focused on identifying patients with rare diseases through large-scale medical records analysis.
“Even if you’re a rural patient, you might have come in to one doctor saying you had some joint pain and somebody else saying you had a dry eye,” said Cristy Page, MD, MPH, CEO of Chapel Hill, N.C.-based UNC Health and dean of the UNC School of Medicine. “It’s able to pull that and identify which patients may have a rare disease and particularly one that could be benefited by an earlier diagnosis.”
The health system is working at scale to impact the wellness of the region. UNC Health has a physician in all 100 of North Carolina’s counties. Dr. Page leads a national initiative in rural graduate medical education, expanding branch campuses and rural residency programs specifically designed to place physicians in underserved areas long-term. When UNC consolidated its cancer service line with UNC Lineberger Cancer Center, it created a single leadership structure, the same person serves as cancer center director and service line director, to ensure that trial access and standards of care extend uniformly across the network.
“Wherever you show up, if it’s rural North Carolina and you’re in one of our network places, that you’re going to get the same standards of care, you’re going to get access to the same trials,” Dr. Page said.
UNC is also moving forward on a 50-50 partnership with Duke to create the North Carolina Children’s Hospital, the first freestanding children’s hospital of its kind in North Carolina or South Carolina.
“We compete on everything else, and I mean everything else,” Dr. Page said. “But as it comes to the care of children, it just makes so much sense.”
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