Welcome
Around Harvard
Globe-themed issue of Academic Medicine leads off with Crone article on the flattening of medicine
The February 2008 issue of leading academic journal Academic Medicine takes up the issue of global health—more specifically, what faculty and students at U.S. academic health centers are doing about it. Introducing the special issue, journal editor Steven Kanter writes that the globally-focused activities of these centers "range in scope from comprehensive, multidisciplinary, multi-professional activities—with patient care, research, and education components—to individual courses."
"What is it, asks Kanter, that is raising interest in international affairs among academic health centers and, in record numbers, their students and residents? He provides the litany of familiar reasons for health care professionals to look abroad: the opportunity to study diseases in a different environment, a way to “engage their commitment to social justice,” and—not to be ignored—the opportunity to “combine travel with learning.” For the schools themselves he surmises that they too have something to learn from global experience, as it may help “improve thinking about local issues in their institutions and communities, both of which are becoming more global as the population continues to diversify.”
A page later the issue’s lead article, written by Robert K. Crone, MD, presents an entirely different explanation for why U.S. academic health centers are engaging abroad: there is tremendous demand, from outside the U.S., for them to do so.
From 1995 to 2007, Dr. Crone was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Harvard Medical International. In his article, entitled “Flat Medicine? Exploring Trends in the Globalization of Health Care,” he argues that the changing global health landscape is epitomized by what is happening in the world’s emerging economies—those countries, home to 70 percent of the population, that fall somewhere between the wealthiest (for example, the 30 OECD countries) and the least developed (most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa). Dr. Crone writes:
As the health care systems in this middle group of countries develop critical mass through enhancing quality and patient safety, they will increase their ability to attract and retain health care professional experts, originate new technologies, and develop new centers of excellence that will begin to draw patient flows and academic medicine away from the historic centers of excellence in OECD countries.
As Dr. Crone explains, many of the advances in health care systems are being helped along because of formal collaborations between health care delivery organizations and academic institutions in the emerging economies and top U.S. institutions. He draws on three stellar Harvard Medical International collaborations—with Dubai Healthcare City in the United Arab Emirates, Acibadem Healthcare Group in Turkey, and Wockhardt Hospitals Limited in India—to illustrate the point, and proceeds to explore how the globalization of health care, so important to so many around the world, may have important ramifications for institutions—and patients—here in the U.S.
Learn more
Visit: Academic Medicine websiteRead: “Flat Medicine? Exploring Trends in the Globalization of Health Care,” Volume 83, No. 2, February 2008.
More Featrured Stories
Five Questions
PHMI Director Elizabeth Brown is a strong voice for the nursing profession
Affiliate Spotlight
Quality contributions from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
From the Archives
Emergency medicine training initiative continues in Italy
Around Harvard
Targeting pain management, treating muscle degeneration, and tracking the causes of type 2 diabetes. Also: a look at MRI’s emerging role in breast cancer screening, and other news and research from the Harvard medical community.
