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The Benefits of Choosing an Academic Medical Center
How is an academic medical center different from a community hospital? Dr. Cam Patterson, Chancellor, explains the differences and what to expect at UAMS.
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Learn more about Cam Patterson, MD, MBA
Cam Patterson, MD, MBA
Cam Patterson, M.D., MBA, serves as chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), leading Arkansas’ only health sciences university with a mission to educate tomorrow’s health care professionals, perform research that translates to new treatments and deliver exceptional patient care at locations across the state.Learn more about Cam Patterson, MD, MBA
Transcription:
The Benefits of Choosing an Academic Medical Center
Bill Klaproth (Host): So, what is an academic medical center? How does it differ from a community hospital and what are the benefits in choosing an academic medical center? Well let’s find out with Dr. Cam Patterson, the Chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. This is UAMS Health Talk from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. I’m Bill Klaproth. Dr. Patterson, thank you for your time. So, UAMS is a health sciences university with an academic medical center or an AMC. So, how does an AMC differ from a community hospital?
Cam Patterson, MD, MBA (Guest): Well that’s a great question. And academic medical centers differ from community hospitals in many ways. First of all, community hospitals serve specific needs for the communities that they are in, but they tend to be limited in the resources that they are able to provide for patients and families who access them.
Academic medical centers, because they have a teaching mission and a research mission bring an additional layer of medical care to patients who need them. We serve in academic medical centers, not just the local community that we reside in, but we serve the regional hospitals that don’t have access to the services that we also provide. So, our catchment area, the catchment area of an academic medical center is necessarily very large and the services that are provided are services such as solid organ transplantations, assistive services, cutting edge chemotherapy for patients with cancer, drugs that are only available through clinical trials through research that we do. And we frequently have more robust support services for families because we are dealing with more complicated issues.
So, there are a lot of ways that academic medical centers differ from community hospitals but from a patient facing standpoint, those are in my mind, the ones that are most noticeable.
Host: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I like how you said that an additional layer of medical care and it sounds like you really serve the region more so than a community as well. So, you were talking about some of the differences. So, can you give us some examples of care offered at an AMC that isn’t offered at other hospitals?
Dr. Patterson: Sure. Well I think we even have to go one step further and say there are some parts of rural state that don’t have hospitals at all. In the state of Arkansas, 35 out of 75 counties only have one hospital and 29 counties in the state of Arkansas have no hospital at all. So, we work with regional hospitals, but we also work with the communities that don’t even have a regional hospital to provide access to care. And we do this in a lot of ways. Part of this is through our teaching mission. We train 70% of the healthcare professionals in the state of Arkansas or 60% of the physicians who practice in the state of Arkansas, trained at UAMS, our academic medical center here in Arkansas. We do this through community education. We have collaborative arrangements with almost every single regional hospital across the state and most community medical centers.
So, out tentacles are broad, and our focus is on ensuring access to all levels of care whether that’s staying in your community and continuing to get great care or are coming to our medical center here in Little Rock if your problems are more acute.
Host: So, you support the work done at other hospitals then, is that right? Especially in a rural state like Arkansas. Do you have any examples of that?
Dr. Patterson: There are plenty of examples. I think one great example is our statewide stroke program. UAMS is the only comprehensive stroke center in the state of Arkansas but we work collaboratively with every single hospital in the state to provide acute stroke services. So, for example, if you are in east Arkansas and you present to Helena Regional Medical Center with an acute stroke; we have a stroke neurologist available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to communicate with the team at that hospital to determine the appropriate care that needs to initiated. And we see benefits from this. Every year, since we started this statewide stroke network; stroke outcomes have improved for Arkansas. We are the only state in the country that can say that.
Host: Yeah, that’s really important the work you are doing Dr. Patterson. So, I’ve been taking some notes and a few of the differences between an AMC and a community hospital are you provide an additional layer of medical care, you work regionally, not just locally, you work collaboratively with the other hospitals in the state and provide several services that community hospitals don’t offer. So, let’s turn to the teaching end of this. So, what types of students are trained at your university and is it beneficial for them to be able to get their training just steps away from an AMC?
Dr. Patterson: Sure, it is, and I think often when we talk about the students that we train, people’s minds jump immediately to medical students. And we do train medical students, we train most of the medical students who have been trained here in Arkansas, have trained at UAMS. But we also, we have a nursing school, we have a college of pharmacy, we have a college of health professions, we have graduate school. So, the training environment here, the clinical training environment is incredibly robust. And for people who train here, it’s an opportunity not only to train with the best and the brightest physicians doing the most cutting edge clinical care; but it’s an opportunity to train with people in other healthcare professions so that you can create this collaborative team-based care environment.
And that’s something that is really only available at an academic medical center that is able to support multiple different parallel healthcare training programs at the same time and we are really proud that our interprofessional education program, the program that pulls together people from different disciplines during their training and allows them to learn about medicine from the very beginning as a collaborative sport. That’s something that UAMS is nationally recognized for. So, you are only going to get that at an academic medical center. You are only going to get world class educational experience with true interprofessional education from the very beginning at a place like UAMS.
Host: Yeah, I love that the clinical training environment as you put it. So with that comes of course clinical trials. So, when you talk about clinical trials, how are those beneficial to patients?
Dr. Patterson: Well clinical trials are the studies that we do to determine whether our interventions, new medicines, new therapeutic processes are actually working and are actually safe. And the benefit of having access to clinical trials is that you often have access to drugs before they are widely available. So, imagine this. You are a woman unfortunately with widely metastatic breast cancer that’s no longer responsive to standard of care therapies. Well, if you don’t have the ability to go to a place that has clinical trials open with drugs that are on the horizon that might be able to treat someone who is no longer clinically responsive to standard of care therapies; you don’t have any other options. So, by virtue of having access to clinical trials you get access to those cutting edge therapies much earlier and at the same time, you get to contribute as a patient to the medical knowledge database that will help other patients in the future.
So, there’s a benefit to the patient by enrolling in the clinical trial but the patient is also giving back and that’s part of the entire spirit of an academic medical center which is caring for those now and caring for those in the future.
Host: Right, the patient does get a benefit as well not only themselves hoping to get healed but potentially helping to heal others down the line. So, you were talking about cutting edge therapies. I know that in healthcare technology is a huge component. So, can you talk about ways that technology is being used in healthcare?
Dr. Patterson: Well we are moving so quickly in terms of better, faster, cheaper, safer interventions for our patients and the ability to use our informatics, our ability to use high sensitivity clinical assays, new imaging modalities, this is all what is exciting about being in an academic medical center. It’s also exciting to see medicine continue to evolve in a way that benefits our patients. A great example of something that we are very excited about here at UAMS is our technologies for doing liquid biopsies meaning simply taking a blood sample and using that as a way to screen for cancer throughout the body. And we have an internationally recognized program here that is doing cutting edge research on liquid biopsies that we are confident will allow us to diagnose cancer at a much earlier stage to do screening for cancer in a much more simplified way to make the whole process cheaper and to make the whole process less invasive. Fewer biopsies and better results.
So, those are the kinds of technological advances that you see going from an idea into the clinic and improving the healthcare and outcomes of patients in a very short period of time in an academic medical center and it is something that can only be done in an academic medical center.
Host: Right and it’s just a huge benefit to patients when you are speaking about technology. So, let’s stick with that. So, this increased technology we hear about digital health all the time; so, what will the increased use of digital health mean for patients?
Dr. Patterson: Well this is going to be a game changer for patients. We shouldn’t have to say it but where you live shouldn’t determine the kind of healthcare that you receive. And the way I look at digital health is it takes a state of three million people, two thirds of the [00:11:29] mass of the state is depopulating and shrinks it from a healthcare perspective and brings all three million people who live in the state of Arkansas much, much closer to the access to exactly the right care that they need. We’ve been collaborating with the Arkansas Eye Bank and the Lions Clubs of Arkansas to populate the state with Teleretinal devices that allow fast, prompt screening for diabetic retinopathy for people in their community. Now think about this.
If you’re a diabetic and you wait until you actually notice that you have visual problems as a consequence of your diabetes; it’s too late. These Teleretinal screening programs will allow diabetics wherever they live in the state to receive the best screening that they can receive without even having to go to have a face to face visit with an ophthalmologist. So, this going to dramatically increase the number of people that we can screen. It will dramatically increase the number of times that we can screen them, and this can all be done while people stay in their communities with people that they know in an environment that they are comfortable in.
Host: So, I just wrote this down. It’s sounds like equal care for all patients no matter where you live. That sounds like the premise behind this. Is that right?
Dr. Patterson: That’s right. There are some things that you are going to need to come into the academic medical center for. Imagine that your mother unfortunately falls and has a complicated fracture and you live in Arkadelphia an hour and a half away. You are going to want to bring her into Little Rock and have the best orthopedic surgeon fix her hip and hopefully she will have a good experience and no complications and will go home quickly. But a week later, she’s going to need a wound check. And you are going to have to take a day off from work to drive her all the way in to Little Rock. You are going to have to navigate a big medical center for a seven minute office visit. Then you are going to have to turn around and drive back home.
Well what if that seven minute wound check could be done from her living room? Think about the time that it would save. So, in this encounter, you have a patient who comes into the academic medical center for something that they can only receive there but stays in the community that they live in as much as possible to receive any care that we can provide through digital or other means so that she gets all the care that she needs in the most convenient patient friendly way possible.
Host: So, as you describe that scenario Dr. Patterson, it’s easy to see how this can really be a game changer for many people. So, last question and thank you so much for your time. You’ve been very generous with us. What are some of the challenges facing healthcare today?
Dr. Patterson: Well we obviously are in the middle of an ongoing debate about what healthcare should look like in the United States and we continue to have the most expensive healthcare in the world although we don’t necessarily have the best outcomes for all medical care and for all people in the United States. So, that conversation is going to continue. We need to figure out how we can continue to pull costs out of the healthcare system. I think the digital revolution will be one way that we will be able to do that. But we also need to continue to innovate to prove our value.
I feel that it’s important that everyone, every citizen in the United States has access to all healthcare that they need no matter where they live or how much money that they make. And we’ve got to push our healthcare system in a way that we continue to ensure that nobody is left out of the healthcare system. At the same time, we need to continue to be the international leader in innovations to improve the quality of healthcare so that people who are challenged with problems like HIV infection for example, when I was in my training, that was a death sentence. Now it’s really just another chronic disease. We need to see more home runs like that.
Host: So, very true. Well said Dr. Patterson and thank you so much for your time today.
Dr. Patterson: It was my pleasure. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for everything you are doing.
Host: Well thanks again Dr. Patterson and for more information please visit www.uams.edu and if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is UAMS Health Talk. Thanks for listening.
The Benefits of Choosing an Academic Medical Center
Bill Klaproth (Host): So, what is an academic medical center? How does it differ from a community hospital and what are the benefits in choosing an academic medical center? Well let’s find out with Dr. Cam Patterson, the Chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. This is UAMS Health Talk from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. I’m Bill Klaproth. Dr. Patterson, thank you for your time. So, UAMS is a health sciences university with an academic medical center or an AMC. So, how does an AMC differ from a community hospital?
Cam Patterson, MD, MBA (Guest): Well that’s a great question. And academic medical centers differ from community hospitals in many ways. First of all, community hospitals serve specific needs for the communities that they are in, but they tend to be limited in the resources that they are able to provide for patients and families who access them.
Academic medical centers, because they have a teaching mission and a research mission bring an additional layer of medical care to patients who need them. We serve in academic medical centers, not just the local community that we reside in, but we serve the regional hospitals that don’t have access to the services that we also provide. So, our catchment area, the catchment area of an academic medical center is necessarily very large and the services that are provided are services such as solid organ transplantations, assistive services, cutting edge chemotherapy for patients with cancer, drugs that are only available through clinical trials through research that we do. And we frequently have more robust support services for families because we are dealing with more complicated issues.
So, there are a lot of ways that academic medical centers differ from community hospitals but from a patient facing standpoint, those are in my mind, the ones that are most noticeable.
Host: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I like how you said that an additional layer of medical care and it sounds like you really serve the region more so than a community as well. So, you were talking about some of the differences. So, can you give us some examples of care offered at an AMC that isn’t offered at other hospitals?
Dr. Patterson: Sure. Well I think we even have to go one step further and say there are some parts of rural state that don’t have hospitals at all. In the state of Arkansas, 35 out of 75 counties only have one hospital and 29 counties in the state of Arkansas have no hospital at all. So, we work with regional hospitals, but we also work with the communities that don’t even have a regional hospital to provide access to care. And we do this in a lot of ways. Part of this is through our teaching mission. We train 70% of the healthcare professionals in the state of Arkansas or 60% of the physicians who practice in the state of Arkansas, trained at UAMS, our academic medical center here in Arkansas. We do this through community education. We have collaborative arrangements with almost every single regional hospital across the state and most community medical centers.
So, out tentacles are broad, and our focus is on ensuring access to all levels of care whether that’s staying in your community and continuing to get great care or are coming to our medical center here in Little Rock if your problems are more acute.
Host: So, you support the work done at other hospitals then, is that right? Especially in a rural state like Arkansas. Do you have any examples of that?
Dr. Patterson: There are plenty of examples. I think one great example is our statewide stroke program. UAMS is the only comprehensive stroke center in the state of Arkansas but we work collaboratively with every single hospital in the state to provide acute stroke services. So, for example, if you are in east Arkansas and you present to Helena Regional Medical Center with an acute stroke; we have a stroke neurologist available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to communicate with the team at that hospital to determine the appropriate care that needs to initiated. And we see benefits from this. Every year, since we started this statewide stroke network; stroke outcomes have improved for Arkansas. We are the only state in the country that can say that.
Host: Yeah, that’s really important the work you are doing Dr. Patterson. So, I’ve been taking some notes and a few of the differences between an AMC and a community hospital are you provide an additional layer of medical care, you work regionally, not just locally, you work collaboratively with the other hospitals in the state and provide several services that community hospitals don’t offer. So, let’s turn to the teaching end of this. So, what types of students are trained at your university and is it beneficial for them to be able to get their training just steps away from an AMC?
Dr. Patterson: Sure, it is, and I think often when we talk about the students that we train, people’s minds jump immediately to medical students. And we do train medical students, we train most of the medical students who have been trained here in Arkansas, have trained at UAMS. But we also, we have a nursing school, we have a college of pharmacy, we have a college of health professions, we have graduate school. So, the training environment here, the clinical training environment is incredibly robust. And for people who train here, it’s an opportunity not only to train with the best and the brightest physicians doing the most cutting edge clinical care; but it’s an opportunity to train with people in other healthcare professions so that you can create this collaborative team-based care environment.
And that’s something that is really only available at an academic medical center that is able to support multiple different parallel healthcare training programs at the same time and we are really proud that our interprofessional education program, the program that pulls together people from different disciplines during their training and allows them to learn about medicine from the very beginning as a collaborative sport. That’s something that UAMS is nationally recognized for. So, you are only going to get that at an academic medical center. You are only going to get world class educational experience with true interprofessional education from the very beginning at a place like UAMS.
Host: Yeah, I love that the clinical training environment as you put it. So with that comes of course clinical trials. So, when you talk about clinical trials, how are those beneficial to patients?
Dr. Patterson: Well clinical trials are the studies that we do to determine whether our interventions, new medicines, new therapeutic processes are actually working and are actually safe. And the benefit of having access to clinical trials is that you often have access to drugs before they are widely available. So, imagine this. You are a woman unfortunately with widely metastatic breast cancer that’s no longer responsive to standard of care therapies. Well, if you don’t have the ability to go to a place that has clinical trials open with drugs that are on the horizon that might be able to treat someone who is no longer clinically responsive to standard of care therapies; you don’t have any other options. So, by virtue of having access to clinical trials you get access to those cutting edge therapies much earlier and at the same time, you get to contribute as a patient to the medical knowledge database that will help other patients in the future.
So, there’s a benefit to the patient by enrolling in the clinical trial but the patient is also giving back and that’s part of the entire spirit of an academic medical center which is caring for those now and caring for those in the future.
Host: Right, the patient does get a benefit as well not only themselves hoping to get healed but potentially helping to heal others down the line. So, you were talking about cutting edge therapies. I know that in healthcare technology is a huge component. So, can you talk about ways that technology is being used in healthcare?
Dr. Patterson: Well we are moving so quickly in terms of better, faster, cheaper, safer interventions for our patients and the ability to use our informatics, our ability to use high sensitivity clinical assays, new imaging modalities, this is all what is exciting about being in an academic medical center. It’s also exciting to see medicine continue to evolve in a way that benefits our patients. A great example of something that we are very excited about here at UAMS is our technologies for doing liquid biopsies meaning simply taking a blood sample and using that as a way to screen for cancer throughout the body. And we have an internationally recognized program here that is doing cutting edge research on liquid biopsies that we are confident will allow us to diagnose cancer at a much earlier stage to do screening for cancer in a much more simplified way to make the whole process cheaper and to make the whole process less invasive. Fewer biopsies and better results.
So, those are the kinds of technological advances that you see going from an idea into the clinic and improving the healthcare and outcomes of patients in a very short period of time in an academic medical center and it is something that can only be done in an academic medical center.
Host: Right and it’s just a huge benefit to patients when you are speaking about technology. So, let’s stick with that. So, this increased technology we hear about digital health all the time; so, what will the increased use of digital health mean for patients?
Dr. Patterson: Well this is going to be a game changer for patients. We shouldn’t have to say it but where you live shouldn’t determine the kind of healthcare that you receive. And the way I look at digital health is it takes a state of three million people, two thirds of the [00:11:29] mass of the state is depopulating and shrinks it from a healthcare perspective and brings all three million people who live in the state of Arkansas much, much closer to the access to exactly the right care that they need. We’ve been collaborating with the Arkansas Eye Bank and the Lions Clubs of Arkansas to populate the state with Teleretinal devices that allow fast, prompt screening for diabetic retinopathy for people in their community. Now think about this.
If you’re a diabetic and you wait until you actually notice that you have visual problems as a consequence of your diabetes; it’s too late. These Teleretinal screening programs will allow diabetics wherever they live in the state to receive the best screening that they can receive without even having to go to have a face to face visit with an ophthalmologist. So, this going to dramatically increase the number of people that we can screen. It will dramatically increase the number of times that we can screen them, and this can all be done while people stay in their communities with people that they know in an environment that they are comfortable in.
Host: So, I just wrote this down. It’s sounds like equal care for all patients no matter where you live. That sounds like the premise behind this. Is that right?
Dr. Patterson: That’s right. There are some things that you are going to need to come into the academic medical center for. Imagine that your mother unfortunately falls and has a complicated fracture and you live in Arkadelphia an hour and a half away. You are going to want to bring her into Little Rock and have the best orthopedic surgeon fix her hip and hopefully she will have a good experience and no complications and will go home quickly. But a week later, she’s going to need a wound check. And you are going to have to take a day off from work to drive her all the way in to Little Rock. You are going to have to navigate a big medical center for a seven minute office visit. Then you are going to have to turn around and drive back home.
Well what if that seven minute wound check could be done from her living room? Think about the time that it would save. So, in this encounter, you have a patient who comes into the academic medical center for something that they can only receive there but stays in the community that they live in as much as possible to receive any care that we can provide through digital or other means so that she gets all the care that she needs in the most convenient patient friendly way possible.
Host: So, as you describe that scenario Dr. Patterson, it’s easy to see how this can really be a game changer for many people. So, last question and thank you so much for your time. You’ve been very generous with us. What are some of the challenges facing healthcare today?
Dr. Patterson: Well we obviously are in the middle of an ongoing debate about what healthcare should look like in the United States and we continue to have the most expensive healthcare in the world although we don’t necessarily have the best outcomes for all medical care and for all people in the United States. So, that conversation is going to continue. We need to figure out how we can continue to pull costs out of the healthcare system. I think the digital revolution will be one way that we will be able to do that. But we also need to continue to innovate to prove our value.
I feel that it’s important that everyone, every citizen in the United States has access to all healthcare that they need no matter where they live or how much money that they make. And we’ve got to push our healthcare system in a way that we continue to ensure that nobody is left out of the healthcare system. At the same time, we need to continue to be the international leader in innovations to improve the quality of healthcare so that people who are challenged with problems like HIV infection for example, when I was in my training, that was a death sentence. Now it’s really just another chronic disease. We need to see more home runs like that.
Host: So, very true. Well said Dr. Patterson and thank you so much for your time today.
Dr. Patterson: It was my pleasure. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for everything you are doing.
Host: Well thanks again Dr. Patterson and for more information please visit www.uams.edu and if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is UAMS Health Talk. Thanks for listening.