Innovation and Discovery in Primary Care: Creating 21st Century Laboratories and Classrooms for Improving Health (Jennifer DeVoe MD, DPhil)

In the twentieth century, academic medical centers and teaching hospitals built world-class infrastructure to successfully combat disease. There is a growing recognition that this infrastructure is inadequate for the complexity of sustaining and improving population health. Twenty-first century innovation and discovery needs to connect the dots between health, bio-psy-cho-social-environmental factors, health workforce, and health system transformation. It must reach far beyond the walls of basic science laboratories and academic hospitals. Family medicine is leading efforts to: 1) Build community 'laboratories' that support the 'science of health,' complementary to those supporting the 'science of medicine'; 2) Cultivate and strengthen community 'classrooms' that support learning and discovery in the places where people live, work, and play; 3) Build the bridges that support the development of collaborative community-academic partnerships for these laboratories and classrooms to thrive and facilitate bidirectional teaching, learning, innovation, and discovery; 4) Collaborate with a wide range of organizations to deepen our societal understanding that promoting population health is distinct from combating disease and create a roadmap for collective community-academic accountability for population health. Innovative ideas about communities as centers of learning, the importance of social factors as major determinants of health, and the need for multi-disciplinary perspectives t...
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