A new conceptual framework for academic health centers.

Led by the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. health care system is undergoing a transformative shift toward greater accountability for quality and efficiency.

The role of academic psychiatry in leading health policy reform.

The authors discuss the current state of mental health care reform and the opportunity for academic psychiatry to emerge in a leadership role in the organization and delivery of mental health care.

Success factors in merging teaching hospitals.

Merger has served as a major strategy for the leaders of academic medical centers (i.e., teaching hospitals) who are pursuing health system development for their institutions.

Delivering value: provider efforts to improve the quality and reduce the cost of health care.

Growing concern regarding costs of care and health outcomes in the United States has led to widespread calls to address the issue of health care spending. Today, providers across the country are working both to improve the quality and to reduce the cost of health care. These activities span multiple care delivery settings and include care standardization and redesign, shared decision making, palliative care, care coordination, readmission reduction, patient engagement, predictive modeling, and direct cost reduction.

A regional health collaborative formed By NewYork-Presbyterian aims to improve the health of a largely Hispanic community.

Communities of poor, low-income immigrants with limited English proficiency and disproportionate health burdens pose unique challenges to health providers and policy makers. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital developed the Regional Health Collaborative, a population-based health care model to improve the health of the residents of Washington Heights-Inwood. This area is a predominantly Hispanic community in New York City with high rates of asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and depression.

Commentary: models of academic-clinical partnerships: goods, better, best.

Elsewhere in this issue, Ovseiko and colleagues discuss organizational models for emerging academic health science centers (AHSCs) in England. In this commentary, the authors consider the advantages, or "goods," to organizing educational, clinical, and research missions within the AHSC model. Cultivating relationships among the three central missions of academic medicine yields good results for clinicians, trainees, patients, researchers, and communities, but it can also inspire all stakeholders to strive for better results.

The Clinical Research Forum and Association of American Physicians disagree with criticism of the NIH Roadmap.

As representatives of 50 leading academic medical centers focusing on clinical research and many of academic medicine's scientific leaders, the Clinical Research Forum and Association of American Physicians disagree with the JCI's recent editorials on the NIH Roadmap, Elias Zerhouni's leadership, and the future directions of biomedical research.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital: translating innovation into practice.

Background: NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) Hospital, a 2,242-bed not-for-profit academic medical center, was formed by a merger of The New York Hospital and The Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York. It is also the flagship for the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System, with 37 acute care facilities and 18 others.

Overall Approach To Quality And Safety: The hospital embeds safety in the culture through strategic initiatives and enhances service and efficiency using Six Sigma and other techniques to drive adoption of improvements.

Building a transcontinental affiliation: a new model for academic health centers.

The recent affiliation of The Methodist Hospital (TMH) with Weill Medical College (WMC) of Cornell University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is the first transcontinental primary affiliation between major, not-for-profit academic health centers (AHCs) in the United States. The authors describe the process followed, the issues involved, the initial accomplishments, and the opportunities envisioned. The key enablers of this affiliation were a rapid process, mutual trust based on existing professional relationships, and commitment to the project by Board leadership.

Model for a merger: New York-Presbyterian's use of service lines to bring two academic medical centers together.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is the result of the 1998 merger of two large New York City academic medical centers, the former New York and Presbyterian Hospitals, and is affiliated with two independent medical schools, the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Joan and Sanford J. Weill Medical College of Cornell University. At the time of the merger, the hospital faced a number of significant challenges, chief among them the clinical integration of the two medical centers.

National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association consensus statement on the use of placebo in clinical trials of mood disorders.

A consensus conference on the use of placebo in mood disorder studies consisted of expert presentations on bioethics, biostatistics, unipolar depression, and bipolar disorder. Work groups considered evidence and presented statements to the group. Although it was not possible to write a document for which there was complete agreement on all issues, the final document incorporated input from all authors.