The Department of Medicine, Penn Health System's largest department, is responsible for overseeing hundreds of thousands of patients, performing cutting-edge research and educating future physicians.
In response to recent changes in funding from the National Institutes of Health for medical research, there has been a gradual but distinctive change in how the Department of Medicine is running its operations.
Between 1997 and 2002, federal NIH funding to the department doubled.
However, with the most recent federal budget, the dramatic increases have slowed, and will now only increase at an approximately inflationary rate.
Although this change made Department of Medicine officials "cautious" at first, they soon found that the changes could be channeled into further improvement for an already illustrious organization, Department Chairman Andrew Schafer says.
The department has "such a long tradition of excellence," Schafer says, that "temporary external forces can't compromise the commitment to excellence."
The Department of Medicine is the largest of 28 departments in the Penn Health System. It employs over 250 faculty members, 180 residents and many physicians, totaling over 800 employees.
In the most recent survey, this department alone received almost $105 million from the NIH. This amount, a fraction of what the entire Health System receives, is only exceeded by the grants given to Johns Hopkins University and the University of California-San Francisco Medical School.
Under the new funding agenda, the "future of really outstanding medical research will be done through teamwork," Schafer says. By bringing together groups of investigators, officials hope to accelerate the process of making research discoveries applicable to everyday patients.
In fact, this sort of "translational research" has been exactly what Schafer has been concentrating on developing since he came to the department in September 2002.
In a "move toward becoming one of the great departments in the country," Senior Vice Chairman Stan Goldfarb says that Schafer has "laid out what is quite an exciting agenda."
"Charting our future [and] building up the translational research program" through corroborative work have been "the biggest things" Schafer has concentrated on since coming to Penn, Goldfarb says.
As well as concentrating on these two things, Goldfarb said that the department plans on "elevating its clinical mission" to be as prestigious as its research and education systems.
Last year, the Department of Medicine treated over 350,000 outpatients and over 20,000 inpatients, according to the department's Web site. Improving facilities, Goldfarb said, is a big step to becoming "one of the premier departments in the country."
