Search for tag: "collaboration"

I think the regulatory agencies can use their platform to help inspire science and development of new tools that will provide better, safer, more effective, higher quality products, which is really what we're trying to do in terms of getting good therapies to patients.

The major barrier to entry in the market is the cost and the time that it takes to bring a discovery that's made in the laboratory actually to the clinic.

On average, right now, to bring a new drug to the market, it's probably somewhere between one and two billion dollars. If you've made a $2 billion investment in a new product, what do you have to price it at in order to get your return on investment?

If we were to try to support cures for all the orphaned diseases, it would consume the entire U.S. GDP. Clearly, we need to do a better job in driving down development costs so that we can drive down what these products are listed at in order to not completely break the healthcare system.

All of these different trends that are happening in the industry, the kind of merger and acquisition, the loss of capital, the direction that science is driving toward smaller markets, all of this is really converging to a point where this industry is under significant stress.

I think one of the things we need to do is think about establishing a national infrastructure for clinical trials. The other thing we need to think about is how we design smarter, I'll call them leaner, less expensive clinical trials that allow us to get just as much information about a therapy out of a much smaller trial.

We spend little to no effort on actually taking what knowledge we have, in terms of real world performance and things that we know about in prior studies, and integrating it back, or reverse engineering into the discovery or to the next generation product development.

Probably, most importantly, we don't include the patient and the consumer perspective. What are their opinions? What are their experiences, which are going to be critically important.

I think the academic medical centers are the drivers, or the engines of discovery and innovation, in terms of bringing basic fundamental mechanisms of knowledge of disease forward.

I think what academic medical centers could do, that might improve the situation, is take those findings a little bit further down that path of product development.

One of the problems, of course, is that they're not funded to do so. So the NIH isn't really funding product development, and that's something that I think, that the FDA is trying to change through its Regulatory Science Initiative, but it may necessitate other types of partnerships between academic institutions and private industries.

One of the problems that we have in our university, and I think that this is the case in a lot of research institutions, is people get very focused on the projects they're working on. They're in their lab, or they're in their particular school or department, and those are the people they see and those are the people that they spend time with. Particularly in an institution like UAB, which is very research driven and very grant driven, you've got really, really bright people who are spending all of their time working on that next grant, working on that next project, and they don't have time to really get out of that space.

If you think about the role of a librarian in a large university, we know more people across the campus than anybody else because our job is to be out there. So we know when there's a sociologist who is working on a problem that somebody in neurology might be working on, and we can help make those connections.

My algorithm for innovation is that you need to figure out ways to bring people from different disciplines together and then see what happens.

It comes from my father who said, "You have to leave this world a better place than you entered it." And that's my core value, I want to leave this world a better place and there is no better way that I can ensure that it's a better place than by implementing ideas that help people. It's something I wish. I wake up every day excited about what I do. You give back to the world that has provided to you.

There are a lot of innovative things that are reported in journals that never, ever see the light of day and the common person never sees their impact. The fact that somebody thought of something that is buried in a journal somewhere, no meaning to me. For me, innovation is seeing that impact in the real world. My professional career requires so much input from so many sides that one person thinking that they can do it all I think is quite arrogant.

I think collaboration in the 21st century is essential. I don't think that I am capable personally in this current world of representing all the dimensions that I operate in. I have to be fed ideas and information constantly by the people surrounding me. There is no possible way that I can understand how to deliver a drug to a tumor unless I see a surgeon and have that surgeon show me how. Now I have the ideas to go back and make that work.

So I think my value as an educator is based entirely on connectivity, on being able to relate exactly what I'm teaching, to exactly what I know is happening in the real world. I think you have to enable students of all ages. They come in with naÔve ideas and you can easily brush them aside and say, "What do you know? You have not been trained in this area." But I think that they come with a seed and that seed you have to consider seriously because they often times have a different perspective that I don't have the luxury of thinking about.

So when they dump this idea on your table, rather than just brushing it in the trashcan, often times I'll try to think all right I'll buy into this and see how this might work. See if it has any basis for reality and if it does, then give them a chance to show me. My personal philosophy is that this education process has to prepare someone to go innovate with impact, that these are always targeted toward some end game. That's impact for me, that's innovation.

I took care of adolescent leukemia patients for eight years. And that's a really difficult thing to do. I cannot tell you that it was less difficult for me on the last day than it was on the first day.

I was taught that gradually you become less sensitive to the patient situation if you take care of patients in desperate situations. I found that to be totally untrue.

The purpose of healthcare is to make a person as healthy as possible. And if that is perfect health, great. There are times in people's lives when that's no longer possible, but to keep them at their highest functioning level, and as happy as they can be for as long as possible. The goal of health care is not just to do that, but to find out what that means for the patient, and do that.

I see all of these things as an opportunity, and how do we take the situation we're in, and help turn it into something that's really great. When we talk about patient experience for example, the patient has a head injury doesn't think of patient experience in the same way as a mother who has just given birth. You can't have a formula for the whole hospital. Everybody does it differently.

What we do here at nursing is we have the right people, and that's not easy. We have to hire people who've got a passion for what they're doing.

We started out with a top down approach, and of course that doesn't work, and I know that doesn't work. So what we said was you take care of patients everyday, you know what your patients need, and I know that you want to make the best possible care that we can for them. Tell me what the barriers are, and my job is to remove the barriers so that you can provide that kind of care for your patient everyday.

I don't dictate anything. I don't tell people what they have to do. I tell them what the goal is, I try to inspire them that the goal is worthy, and then I ask them to think through what's the best option for their staff, and their patients. Then that's how we get all of our innovation.

Most of the things that we do, I had no idea that that's the way it's going to come out. I'm always thrilled to death to see what they come up with. They come up with some fabulous ideas that I never would have thought of. It's imperative that the patient is at the front of all of our conversations. It's all for the patient.

I've only been dean for 22 years. I'm the longest standing dean. Whenever I sit down, I'm the longest sitting dean. I've lived through two health care reforms, in the '90s, and again now. What's really important now is that we all work together. What I've learned is that you have to bring people together toward a common mission.

It's now explicit in the letters of offer for our chairs that they have to work with each other, with me and with the hospital directors to make all of us as good as we can be. It's not good enough anymore to have the top five department of surgery or medicine or pediatrics in the country if everybody else isn't part of the team. And it's not intuitive for all of us to do that, but we have to be working together if we're going to survive.

I don't know that we've ever, in the course of human history, designed anything that was perfect and could last forever. We need to be ready for change.

As the old joke goes, people will say, "Change is good. You go first." What I see being different now is the people not only acknowledge that change is important and it's good, but more and more of them are willing to go first.

I see groups of institutions forming coalitions that will work on big change, transformational efforts, in their own institution. When that starts to happen, it will ripple throughout academic medicine, and healthcare in general.

The issue isn't competing against each other. The issue is we all have very similar mission statements. We want to improve the health of the public, and that's a big challenge.

Sadly, in many ways, the U.S. healthcare system is broken. We have great medicine. We have great surgeries, great medications and tests. But the system isn't working. And so, more and more what I see the people at this meeting thinking about isn't, "Where do I stand relative to anybody else," but, "Are we innovating? Are we changing ourselves in a way that we really can start to improve the health of the country."

We bring together people from all parts of the medical school, research, teaching, the administration, together with the health system. It's a place where the community really can come together and share ideas. I would argue there's never been a time when we need more new ideas to help us meet the challenges we face.

People who are coming to this meeting are going to leave more ready to push for change, to exert leadership, to argue for innovation on their home campus. All boats will rise together, and eventually we will create a tipping point where I think people will look at academic medical centers in this country ten years from now and say, "We were in trouble when it came to healthcare, and they led the solution.”