New research exemplifies how to align academic missions in family medicine

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (5/29/2024) — Academic departments in the health sciences frequently struggle to balance their core missions — such as care, education and research — finding they can clash or compete instead of working well together. 

In a new study, published in Annals of Family Medicine, a team from the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health presents a longitudinal case example showing how it aligned its missions, ensuring that each supports and enhances the other rather than being experienced as competing priorities. 

The Department of Family Medicine and Community Health created its shared vision and method for harmonizing its academic missions of care, education and research so that each informs and enriches the others without subordinating any of them. The approach aims to improve patient care and health, clinician training and the research needed to ask and answer questions to improve both patient care and education. A harmonized approach also aims to be a foundation for a learning health system that improves physician and faculty well-being.

“‘Harmonized’ means no one mission subordinates the others. Changes in one are immediately translated into corresponding changes in the others,” said C.J. Peek, PhD, a professor at the U of M Medical School and corresponding author. “For example, a transformation in a care process is accompanied by corresponding shifts in learning experiences or curricula — while emerging research and evaluation questions are quickly taken up and answered by those doing the work. Faculty are to experience the work of harmonized missions as one coherent job and therefore derive greater satisfaction.” 

The publication team found that current literature describes the problems of the academic tripartite mission as fragmented, along with a need for specific methods and operating strategies to harmonize those missions in practice. The Department found it useful to create a culture that moves in this direction without trying to tell people exactly what to do and how—by employing methods from complexity science, including:

• Creation of a shared "good enough vision" of a department with its missions working well together like a jazz ensemble playing a single piece with its different instruments.
• ‘Simple rules” that everyone can use to move toward harmonized performance: practical guidelines include sharing innovations, designing projects collaboratively, using harmonization during crises, and providing feedback across missions.
• Productive and frequent interactions between people working in the different missions such as with a “harmonization group” of operational leaders that helps implement actions in a way that makes the most of care, education and research at the same time.

"Harmonizing our missions has served to really bind together faculty who have varying roles across this large and complex department. As such, it has aligned our missions and created a unified culture of faculty productivity," said James Pacala, MD, MS, a professor at the U of M Medical School and co-author. 

Funding was provided internally by the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. 

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About the University of Minnesota Medical School
The University of Minnesota Medical School is at the forefront of learning and discovery, transforming medical care and educating the next generation of physicians. Our graduates and faculty produce high-impact biomedical research and advance the practice of medicine. We acknowledge that the U of M Medical School is located on traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe, and scores of other Indigenous people, and we affirm our commitment to tribal communities and their sovereignty as we seek to improve and strengthen our relations with tribal nations. For more information about the U of M Medical School, please visit med.umn.edu. 

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