Fairview Health Services

The primary purpose of our educational and research programs is to benefit patients and the community at large by educating health professionals both within Fairview and in the broader community, and by fostering advances in knowledge and evidence-based improvements to clinical treatments and approaches to health care delivery. The Office of the Chief Academic Officer champions the work of the research and education teams at M Health Fairview. The CAO leverages resources across the M Health Fairview partnership to improve research and education in the system, creates significant milestones on our journey to becoming a learning health system, utilizes a Clinical Learner Experience survey to continually improve the education and connection with our future healthcare workforce, and builds out research support services to support systemwide studies. RESEARCH - Research is an integral and critical component in providing exceptional care to patients and the community. As an academic health system, M Health Fairview is committed to clinical innovation. A young patient was living with a horrible disease with no previously known cure. Through the care of our teams and a new kind of treatment, the patient is now doing remarkably well. While this is one patient's story, it's a "We, Together" story. We, together, ran a clinical trial that helped discover the promise of this new treatment. And we, together, not only cared for this young patient but had a role in training those who did. Throughout 2024, there were many more We, Together stories. We, together, are making our system an easy and efficient place to do practice-changing research and deliver leading-edge care. Together, we recruited 6,273 new patient accruals for clinical trials across M Health Fairview, exceeding our target for 2024. In particular, our Fairview Frontiers team continues to outperform other sites in recruiting patients, especially BIPOC populations, in wearable device trials. In 2024, the M Health Fairview Clinical Research Unit (CRU) began conducting cellular therapies, after conducting gene therapy studies for the first time in 2023, all while working to expand access beyond clinic hours. Work on a pediatric CRU culminated with the opening of the Blythe Brenden Children's Clinical Research Center, which saw its first patient at the end of 2024. Experts in our system developed our own pharmacogenomics testing, helping our care teams treat patients faster and avoid the long wait times that outsourced testing creates. Nearly 450,000 M Health Fairview patients have participated in studies that improved healthcare practices, conducted by investigators in the University of Minnesota Center for Learning Health System Sciences RapidEval program. Studies on COVID-19 in our system continue to have far-reaching effects. Since 2020, 68 University of Minnesota researchers have collaborated with others from more than 100 other organizations, participating in 17 projects, authoring 25 papers, and leading substantial work as part of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). EDUCATION - The education team is focused on the learner, the educator, and education program support. The team strives to provide an exceptional clinical education experience for all our learners in a team-based best practice care setting. As an academic health system, we're committed to training the next generation of healthcare workers by providing the best team-focused clinical education experience for a diverse and representative group of learners. When learners do better, their patients do better. We, together, also continue to build on our reputation for providing a top-class clinical learning experience among learners and academic partners. A Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) visit from the ACGME this year provided a great opportunity to demonstrate all we, together, have built and the vast improvements we've made for all of our learners. We received a 30% expansion of Graduate Medical Education slots in Fairview hospitals for the coming years, an unusually large increase that greatly expands our ability to train the next generation of healthcare professionals. Our Clinical Learning Environment surveys and Preceptor surveys continue to show improving scores over the course of 2024. Our preceptors, pacesetters, and teams continue to build the connections with learners that encourage them to start their careers with us when they graduate. Our work with providers to train the next generation of healthcare professionals includes supporting hundreds of student observations. Cost of Providing Research and Education: During the year, Fairview has created more access to clinical trials for patients throughout the region and built a reputation amongst learners and academic partners for providing a top-class clinical learning experience. Fairview has committed to training the next generation of healthcare workers by providing the best team-focused clinical education experience for learners. The current year net community benefit for providing this education experience is $201,899,356. Fairview is committed to clinical innovation. Since 2019, new and enhanced capabilities have been created that greatly increase our capacity to make medical discoveries. The current year net community benefit for providing the clinical trial experience is $3,937,360.