Shoring Up the Foundation

The Feinberg School has advanced significantly in recent years. We have made major investments and commitments to construction and renovation, faculty recruitments, curricular reform, and financial management. These efforts will continue to result in our substantial growth in size and stature. However, our physical infrastructure, administrative systems, support services, and culture have trailed that growth. The next five years will see activity that brings the entire enterprise to the stature we expect at Northwestern. An important part of our strategic approach is to invest in addressing our growing pains and in areas where we have deficiencies, particularly those that support faculty members and students. 

During the past several years, we have admitted a national medical student body with some of the highest credentials we have seen. We will refine our admissions process to continue recruiting a more diverse, more national student body, of even higher caliber, from a wide range of undergraduate schools. Our goal is to compete with the best medical schools for the best and most desirable students, as measured by the number of applicants jointly accepted by the Feinberg School and the nation’s top medical schools who then choose to matriculate here. While we have made progress in recruiting a more diverse medical student class through our regular admissions pathway, we need to improve the diversity of students admitted through the Honors Program in Medical Education (HPME) and the Medical Scientist Training Program, which leads to both MD and PhD degrees.

The HPME, a combined seven-year BA-MD program, has historically accounted for up to one-third of the medical school class with approximately 60 matriculants per year. The school would like to reduce the program to 20 students per year, with 12 to 15 admitted in the standard manner as freshmen and 5 to 8 admitted as sophomores. This will help address some deficiencies related to academic performance of some HPME students and improve the overall diversity of the medical school class, since few minorities enter on this pathway. We recognize, however, that the HPME is a joint program with the Evanston campus undergraduate program and any changes must meet our collective needs.

The medical school will complete the overhaul of our model of providing financial aid from a complex system of debt caps and subsidies to grants-in-aid and at the same time improve student support services. The University recently announced plans to phase out professional student housing on the Chicago campus, prompting the school to review subsequent increased needs for secure, around-the-clock study space and wireless access. We will further incorporate into our educational programs information technology for learning and evaluation of educational programs. We will  comprehensively assess the impact of technology on medicine and therefore on the curriculum and the use of resources, such as the Galter Health Sciences Library, Learning Resource Center, and Weinberg Medical Informatics Training Center, with the goal of making optimal use of technology in medical education.

Changes in the financing and delivery of health care during the past decade reduced payments and moved much patient care into the ambulatory setting. This has placed significant pressures on faculty members to increase their clinical productivity, often at the expense of their time commitment to education. We will devote substantial effort to develop and support faculty members in their roles as educators.  We will aspire to create incentives for high-quality educational contributions that go beyond simple economics to develop a culture that values educators and provides opportunities to enhance the skills of faculty members and residents in teaching medical students. 

With more than 3,000 faculty members and a decentralized organization of more than 30 departments, centers, and institutes that span multiple organizations (medical school, clinical practices, and hospitals), the school faces considerable challenges to providing broad-based faculty support. The institution, in large measure, is defined by its faculty. With increased competition for the very best faculty members, we will create an environment that marks the Feinberg School as an outstanding place to build and spend one’s career. Beyond competitive salaries, the key factors to attracting and retaining high-quality faculty members include intellectual quality of life, facilities and infrastructure, vibrant life in the Chicago area, and the school's leadership and clarity of vision. We can improve the environment for faculty members by raising the bar for staff quality and performance through recruitment, development and training. 

We need to improve efforts in communicating our vision and strategies, discussing important issues, and emphasizing the common goals of the academic medical center institutions. The significant expansion of the research enterprise affords an opportunity to use recruitment as retention, bringing collaborators here for our most promising faculty members. We can improve the environment for faculty members by raising the bar for staff quality and performance through recruitment, development, and training. Considerable variation in departmental practice exists in faculty orientation, mentoring, and training in such areas as grant writing, compliance issues, clinical research, and philanthropy; school-led initiatives may help with access and consistency. These will be led by a newly appointed associate dean for faculty development. Similarly, continued refinement of incentive compensation and appointment terms may help further align institutional goals with department goals and improve equity across departments, particularly for PhD scientists. Northwestern has a rich history of interdisciplinary collaboration in education and research—a major focus for us going forward—and we need to ensure that the mechanisms for sharing appointments, resources, and costs across the University allow us to maintain fertile ground for innovative partnerships.  

Improving the overall culture and infrastructure for research is also vital to recruiting and retaining high-quality faculty members.  We plan to increase to 50 per year the number of matriculating graduate students in the Integrated Graduate Program in the Life Sciences, more than double the number at the program's inception. Other initiatives we need to undertake include

• improving and expanding shared and core facilities for research.
• refining processes for identifying when new core facilities are needed and when old ones have outlived their usefulness;  maintaining competitive rate structures and subsidies for core facilities.
• encouraging efforts in translational medicine and technology transfer. 
• making significant progress in two areas in which we have underrecruited since the last strategic plan: functional imaging and health services research. 

The regulatory and legal environment will increasingly influence institutional and individual actions. Our internal culture must evolve to embrace more stringent safeguards for research subjects and staff, improve relationships with our funding agencies, and ensure compliance with regulatory oversight in research and patient care.

For several years research growth at Northwestern has proceeded far ahead of changes to its systems for compliance and to the culture for research. Spurred by significant government investigations and findings, the University is making serious investments in the administrative infrastructure. The Feinberg School will play a major role in defining, developing, and supporting these efforts to improve the overall administrative environment for research specifically and management generally. While efforts are under way to upgrade systems for effort reporting and financial and personnel management, we could also create a strategic advantage by developing true enterprise data and decision support systems.

Capital Improvements

During the last strategic planning cycle, the medical school embarked on a major capital improvements program, including the construction of more than 175,000 nsf of research space in phases 1 and 2 of the Lurie Research Center at a cost of $200 million and more than $50 million in renovation projects for education facilities, research space, administrative offices, and building systems improvements.

During the next five years, we will complete the construction and productive occupancy of the Lurie Research Center (see appendix) and plan for construction of phase 3, a 16-story addition that will house up to 90 new faculty investigators. We will continue to renew and replace our buildings and systems, and complete renovation and consolidation of research space in the existing complex. Space is a precious, limited resource, and we will improve and make more transparent our processes for evaluating and allocating space throughout the enterprise. A new parking structure will be built adjacent to the Erie lot, bringing more than 1,000 new spaces to campus.

Our major strengths are the quality of the University, teaching hospitals, and practice plans and a shared vision of a pre-eminent academic medical center at Northwestern that will benefit us all as well as the broader community. But ensuring a sustainable, shared commitment to academic excellence throughout separate institutions with sometimes disparate goals can be a challenge.  The collective leadership of our academic medical center must be innovative and flexible in developing and maintaining the resources, infrastructure, and culture necessary to achieve our shared vision.