Message from the
Executive Vice Chancellor

I have been privileged to serve as executive vice chancellor of KU Medical Center in a time of great transformation and transition. The landscapes of both medicine and bioscience have radically changed in the last decade, and every institution and school is adjusting to this very different reality.

What has become clear during the last decade is that no one organization can march into the future alone. Gone are the days when a hospital or university could establish itself as a selfsufficient institution. We now see a new paradigm, one in which constructing partnerships and fostering collaboration is not only beneficial to success, but is, in fact, a fundamental requirement for success.

The future of health care, research and medical education is truly dependent on partnerships. KU Medical Center could not excel without the ideas and support of our partners. In the fight to defeat disease with the latest research and to train the best health care professionals, we know that it is crucial to share resources and responsibilities.

Our partnerships are paying great dividends for Kansas. We dispatch students to every part of the state to train with doctors. We fly specialists to smaller communities to work with primary care physicians to provide first-rate care and use innovative telemedicine to diagnose patients throughout Kansas. Our researchers are working with other universities in the state to develop groundbreaking drugs and treatments for devastating diseases.

But our partnerships reach far beyond Kansas. We are proud to be working with some of the top medical institutions in the United States and the world on cancer research and drug development. We pursue these alliances because we recognize that the crucial need for education and patient care transcends traditional boundaries. Ideas have replaced institutions as the motivating force of research and care, and those of us working at academic medical centers must work together in advancement of those ideas.

In the following pages you will read about just a few of our partnerships. For each one represented here, there are dozens of other equally important relationships in which we take great pride. While there is no practical way to tell you about all of them, we hope the snapshot provided here will illustrate just how critical these partnerships are to our success. +