Overview Memo

Over the course of the last several months, in consultation with senior leaders from both UMass Memorial Health Care and UMass Medical School, consensus was reached that it would be in the interest of both organizations that comprise our academic health center, to spend some time together crafting a joint strategic planning effort.

During the past few days, forty senior administrators and academic leaders, (see list below) from both the clinical system and the medical school, gathered together to discuss the core values of the entities, gain a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that face our respective organizations and create a framework for the development of a strategic plan for our academic health center enterprise.  

Guided by skilled facilitators from the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health, we learned about the elements of the successful planning efforts that have propelled Vanderbilt to its premier position among our nation’s academic health centers.  Throughout our days together, we came to better understand each other’s ideas and hopes for the future of our academic health center.  Further, we discovered that there was a prevailing spirit of cooperation and a great deal of passion and enthusiasm, on the part of the participants, for coming together to plan our future.

Thus, we are pleased to announce that we have launched a joint strategic planning task force that will work throughout this academic year to develop an extensive strategic plan that will assist us as we chart our ambitious collective future.

The twenty-nine member task force (see membership below) will be comprised of a broad group of leaders from stakeholders within both communities.  The effort will be jointly chaired by Walter Ettinger, M.D., President of UMass Memorial Medical Center and Terence Flotte, M.D., Dean and Executive Deputy Chancellor of UMass Medical School.  However, both of us will be active participants on the task force and will work together to encourage the planning effort in the months ahead. 

We have agreed on an aggressive set of work plans and timeframes, which will culminate in the completion of a final report by May 15, 2008.   To meet our timeline, we have established six work groups that will concentrate their efforts on areas that we have identified as critical success factors for our future.  The work groups and their leaders are as follows:

• Faculty and Leadership Development
  • Judy Ockene, Ph.D., Interim Vice Chancellor for Faculty Administration
  • Doug Ziedonis, MD, Chair of Psychiatry
• Clinical Care
  • Andrew Sussman, M.D., Chief Operating Office, UMMHC
  • David Ayers, M.D., Chair, Orthopedics
• Education
  • Michele Pugnaire, M.D., Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs
  • Randall Long, M.D., Interim Chair, Neurology
• Research
  • Robert Finberg, M.D., Chair, Medicine
  • John Sullivan, M.D., Vice Chancellor for Research
• Public Services
  • Daniel Lasser, M.D., Chair, Family Medicine and Community Health
  • Joyce Murphy, Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer, Commonwealth Medicine
• Acting as a Single Enterprise
  • Tom Manning, Deputy Chancellor, Commonwealth Medicine
  • Todd Keating, Senior Vice President, CFO, UMMHC

The Strategic Planning Task Force will have its first meeting within the next few weeks.  We have asked each of the work groups to convene as soon as possible to assess the charge that has been provided by the retreat participants.  Work group leaders will be reaching out throughout our community to invite others to participate in their work efforts. 

We established the commitment to communicate effectively and frequently in the months ahead. To that end, we are creating a website, which will allow all who are interested in the goals of the strategic planning effort, and the deliberations of the task force and its work groups, access to information in a timely fashion.  When the website is operational, we will communicate with you as to how you can access it and interact, via the website, with the task force and its work groups.   The success of our planning effort will depend upon involvement of the members of our academic health center community.  Therefore, we encourage your active participation.

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to those who participated in our retreat effort.  We are grateful for the mutual respect that characterized all of our interactions and the trust that was developed throughout our time together. It is clear to us and to all who participated in this retreat that it was a watershed moment for our respective organizations.  As a result of the open and honest conversations that occurred, together as a team, we jointly committed our efforts to create the vision for our common future as a premier academic health center. 

 Retreat Participants (October 16-18, 2007)

UMass Academic Health Center Strategic Planning Task Force Members