Mission Critical — Integrating Clinician-Educators into Academic Medical Centers

The mission of academic medical centers typically includes three distinct goals: providing patient care, educating future doctors, and acquiring new medical knowledge.1 Academic medical centers seek excellence in each of the three areas to distinguish themselves as outstanding in the local community, region, and nation. Although the mission statements of most academic medical centers do not point to one of these goals as more important than the others, we believe that the research goal has predominated during the past three decades, as evidenced by reward and promotion systems that are heavily weighted toward research. As academic medical centers rapidly expanded . . .