When classes began at UCF last month, the Lake Nona community became part of the university’s new Academic Health Sciences Center (AHSC). And I hope you will be as excited as I am about the opportunities that lie before us.
This new center brings together all of UCF’s health-related colleges and programs with the goal of increased opportunities for interprofessional education, research and patient care. Medicine is a team sport – and the best way to care for our patients is to work and communicate together.
The AHSC includes the UCF Colleges of Medicine and Nursing and creates a new College of Health Professions and Sciences. This new college is comprised of UCF Health programs like social work, athletic training, physical therapy, kinesiology, communication sciences and disorders, and population health. The diversity of these programs shows the many unique ways we as healthcare providers care for others.
So what does this center add to our university and community? When I think about these questions, I think in terms of knowledge. The currency of a university is knowledge. Knowledge in transmission is education. Knowledge in discovery is research. And knowledge in service or practice is clinical care. As an Academic Health Sciences Center, we, like all parts of the university, participate vigorously in education and research. Clinical care – knowledge in service and practice – is what uniquely bonds us together. It is the special way we engage with and serve our community.
With a new university hospital opening in 2021 and a UCF Cancer Research and Treatment Center on the horizon, our new structure brings together our health education programs with Student Health Services and UCF Health, our multispecialty practice. So, we create a cluster of UCF clinical care that is integrated with our educational and research missions.
This cluster yields synergies we’ve already witnessed. For example, we’ve selected a shared electronic health record system for UCF Health, Student Health Services and UCF Lake Nona Medical Center, our new hospital. With this shared resource, a UCF student getting primary care at Student Health who needs a heart specialist can have their records seamlessly sent to UCF Health. And if that student needs to be hospitalized, his or her records can easily transfer to UCF’s hospital. With such a system, all of that student’s healthcare providers – at three different UCF locations – will be sharing the same data. That means better, more seamless care. This system also provides opportunities for research and education.
Our goal is to have heightened integration and communication in all missions: education, research and patient care. We’ll be able to expand interprofessional education. We’re already doing some of that. Multidisciplinary students currently work together to care for Orlando’s underserved at Knights Clinic, a free clinic at Grace Medical Home. We do the same thing in outreach clinics for farmworkers in Apopka. Our new structure will allow us to expand these kinds of community programs. Improved communication and clinical collaboration will help students better identify programs and training that will help them reach their goals. It will encourage more and better communication between faculty. For example, a nursing faculty member who needs to partner with a neuroscientist or a dermatologist for a research project will be better able to coordinate with fellow UCF research and clinical colleagues. And this new structure will help us work together to meet the healthcare needs of our community – today and tomorrow.
We are just beginning this journey, and as Medical City at Lake Nona grows, so will opportunities for collaboration. We’re currently working on a plan we hope will bring the College of Nursing out to Lake Nona in a building adjacent to the medical school. We hope other programs will follow.
The creation of our Academic Health Sciences Center has already shown us the power of bringing people together with unique and diverse backgrounds who are all passionate about providing outstanding care to patients and training the next generation of healthcare providers. And as a new school year begins, we’re poised to take on this exciting adventure – for our university and our community.