There’s health care (medicine) and then there’s business (medical delivery). And historically, despite a somewhat apparent intersection of interests, academically never the twain shall meet. Dartmouth College apparently aims to change that. According to an article by Jennifer Epstein in Inside Higher Ed, yesterday the president of the college opened
The Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, which will serve as a hub of instruction, research and advocacy on the college’s Hanover, N.H., campus. “We think that health care is one of the greatest issues and is something that our students should learn about,” he said. “It’s also one of the really large problems we at Dartmouth have the capacity to tackle.”
The center’s mission is to find ways of improving the quality and effectiveness of health care while lowering costs by bringing together experts from the humanities, social sciences, business, engineering and medicine. With a multidisciplinary approach, [the president] hopes to find new ways to deliver health care.
The president of Dartmouth, Jim Yong Kim, appears to have developed this interest prior to his 2009 move to Hanover. Kim’s a medical doctor and previously served as chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Though Kim often talks about health care delivery he’s essentially inventing the subject of health care delivery science. Many schools address health policy and medical schools frequently teach ethics and medical humanities but, according to Kim, “we think this is the first to come at these issues in so many ways.” under one roof.
Even better, Dartmouth already owns the roof; the school can house the new center in an existing building, saving costs.
