DISCOVERY /49 Complexities of Healthcare
“In the initial stages of research, particularly when time constraints permit, collecting data should be secondary to getting to know people and establishing rapport.” -Kelly Devers PhD & Richard Frankel PhD Study Design in Qualitative Research—2: Sampling and Data Collection Strategies reshaping healthcare, RJ Bulger, which emphasizes the need “to restore the marriage between humanistic concerns and scientific and technical excellence in health care delivery practices.” These centers for innovation are designed to address this very issue. Academic health centers are not just about pioneering innovative solutions to complex diseases; they must also discover new approaches to delivering their care. But building a center for innovation for an academic health center is tricky business. The cultures have been influenced by an industry where success is determined by scientific and technical data and
status is gained with academic titles and journal publications. Their organizational structures consist of complex hierarchies that climb vertically from nurse to boards of trustees and horizontally with differentiations between academic branches and medical center branches. Reinventing the Academic Health Center is a case study, which examines how a lack of consideration for these complex cultures hindered the progress of merging two separate medical centers. Because of a lack of consideration for these two different cultures, the merger was dissolved just three years after its inception. (Kirch, Grigsby, Zolko, Moskowitz, Hefner, Souba, Carubia, and Baron)