Bold Blueprint for a Bright Future: the School of Medicine Strategic Plan

Where does the Stony Brook University School of Medicine want to be in five years, and how do we get there?

More than 70 School of Medicine faculty, staff and medical students tackled these questions when producing the Stony Brook University School of Medicine Strategic Plan 2011-2015, Translating Research and Transforming Medicine.

The plan outlines the bold vision and mission of a world-class institution. The vision is to become a national leader in academic medicine, to rank as one of the nation’s top public research institutions and to be the first choice in healthcare for patients on Long Island and beyond. The mission is to prepare physicians and investigators in the biomedical and clinical sciences to advance the frontiers of research, education, clinical practice and advocacy. And the catalyst that will help the School of Medicine achieve its goals is innovative and integrative programming centered on basic, translational and clinical research.

“This strategic plan represents a bold vision of the elements necessary to turn the School of Medicine into a world-class institution, an organization that transforms all whom it touches: researchers, educators, learners, patients and members of many communities,” said Senior Vice President, Health Sciences, and School of Medicine Dean Kenneth Kaushansky, MD. “But to obtain bold results, we must be equally bold in funding the vision.” The research component of the plan calls for 80 new basic, translational and clinical faculty recruits and the lab space they require, as well as infrastructure improvements such as modernizing scientific core facilities, equipping the new Imaging Center and developing a new Department of Biomedical Informatics. The new Medical and Research Translation (MART) Center and the renovated Health Sciences will house these expanded research programs, bringing together scientists, translationalists and clinicians to work toward innovation side by side.

The education plan calls for, among other initiatives, the training of 64 more undergraduate medical students annually. This would increase class size to 140 and demand a minimum of 40,000 additional square feet of classroom and laboratory space. Some of this space will be found in the MART, an opportunity to further translate new biomedical research initiatives into an enriched educational environment.

To meet increasing patient volumes, the clinical strategic plan includes expanding Stony Brook University Hospital’s capacity by at least 20 percent over the next 10 years, costing a minimum of $250 million. Outpatient clinical capacity must grow to an equivalent degree, with the construction of three medical office buildings featuring patient-friendly, faculty-efficient settings.

The community outreach component of the plan will support programs ranging from bringing clinical research efforts to Long Island’s diverse population to spreading Stony Brook Medicine to global sites in the sub-Saharan Desert and South America as a means of better training global health providers.

“Individually, and especially all together, these are hefty needs. But we would argue that the consequences of not doing these things are far greater — we would miss the opportunities to contribute to translating basic science to new diagnoses and treatments; apply the skills of our SBU engineers, chemists and mathematicians to medicine; develop new ways to train the next generation of physicians; and deliver the very best care to our patients,” said Dean Kaushansky.

Ambitious Outcomes

The Strategic Plan details a long list of ambitious yet attainable outcomes, including:

• Become a Top 50 National Institutes of Health grant-receiving institution (currently #95).
• Achieve National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center designation.
• Attain a Clinical and Translational Science Award.
• Create a Biomedical Imaging Center.
• Significantly increase undergraduate, resident and fellow enrollment of qualified students from medically underrepresented groups.
• Develop an Accountable Care Organization that establishes and implements best practices across our inpatient, faculty, outpatient and captive physician networks.
• Create a clinical information infrastructure that allows for hardwiring quality-care initiatives and for mining of de-identified patient data warehouses to establish testable hypotheses of clinical causality.
• Engage community healthcare systems in clinical research efforts that understand the barriers to high-quality access and implement pilot projects to eliminate these barriers.