CWRU, Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft team to offer their perspectives
With the future of health care certain to be a central issue for national leaders over the next four years, leaders from Case Western Reserve, Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft this morning will share their ideas with elected officials, media and others gathered this week during the Republican National Convention.
The 10:30 a.m. panel discussion, to be moderated by U.S. News & World Report’s Chief of Health Analysis Ben Harder, will feature Case Western Reserve President Barbara R. Snyder; Cleveland Clinic CEO and President Delos “Toby” Cosgrove; and Laura Wallace, Microsoft’s vice president of U.S. Health & Life Sciences.
The university is livestreaming the 75-minute event, to be held at the Global Center for Health Innovation downtown. To watch the session as it happens, please visit case.edu/livestream/s1/.
Three years ago, Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinic announced that their institutions would collaborate on a medical education building that would include students from the School of Medicine’s university and Lerner College of Medicine tracks. As planning for the project progressed, leaders from the university and hospital quickly recognized that true academic innovation would involve bringing together students from multiple health professions. In 2014, Cosgrove and Snyder announced the project would expand to house the university’s dental and nursing schools—as well as a new physician assistant’s program.
Cosgrove, an internationally renowned cardiac surgeon who has led Cleveland Clinic since 2004, frequently describes health care as a “team sport.” Research consistently shows that patient outcomes and satisfaction improve when they receive treatment from an integrated group of health professionals, but the overwhelming majority of health education continues to take place in isolation; each profession’s students learn individual curricula in separate spaces, and then are expected to understand how to function efficiently in a team upon graduation.
The design of the four-story Health Education Campus, scheduled to open in the summer of 2019, emphasizes interaction among students, staff and faculty across its 485,000 square feet. The building includes a large shared dining area, shared lecture halls and even shared spaces for students to study or relax. The more these students learn together and come to know what each profession can do, the more prepared they will be to excel on teams upon graduation.
Another priority of the university and hospital was to provide students the most advanced technology available throughout the Health Education Campus. Ultimately, that goal led Snyder and Cosgrove to Microsoft, where they learned about a then-secret emerging technology: the mixed-reality device HoloLens. Since then, all three institutions have partnered to explore educational and clinical applications, starting with the development of a holographic anatomy curriculum.
The panel will discuss these subjects and more Tuesday morning; join the audience online at case.edu/livestream/s1/.