UC San Diego Health Sciences is a part of the University of California San Diego.
Health Sciences includes the School of Medicine, the School of
Pharmacy, hopefully soon, the School of Public Health, the faculty practice, and
the hospitals and clinics. And, they're all integrated and interacting to create
a great academic medical system. It starts with patient care and a
first obligation to provide outstanding care for our patients. And, because we are
an academic medical system, our physicians are both clinicians and
educators, as well as scientists. And, they bring their students to the hospital and
clinics so that the patient care is the site for on-site learning for education.
It works both from bed to bench and from bench to bed. So, when a physician has a
good idea but they are taking care of patients, they can bring it back to lab and
try to work it out. They can translate it into patient care by having this
academic medical center, and patients benefit by this very rich environment
where state-of-the-art care is always available. The past decade has
seen by far the biggest growth of UC San Diego Health Sciences. It's been both programmatic
and also facilities. The programs have included great expansions in cancer and
cardiovascular disease, in neurosciences and pediatric health.
The buildings to reflect these programs have been just tremendous and represents an
incredible interaction between the community, philanthropic help and the support of
the general campus. The most obvious and the biggest is Jacobs Medical Center,
a state-of-the-art hospital with three pavilions within it for advanced surgery,
for cancer care, and for infants and women. And then directly across the
street from it is the Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion, which provides multidisciplinary
care for a wide variety of patients. It's one-stop shopping, very patient
oriented, patient friendly in order to extend what's done in the hospital to
the outpatients. The biggest laboratory ever built is the Altman Clinical and
Translational Research Institute, which was our first laboratory that's devoted
primarily to clinical and translational research. So, there's a large number of
what we call dry labs where people interact in large community spaces
and do things like translational research, genomics, informatics and other
types of big data analysis. What's on the horizon? I think there are a couple of
ideas that are evolving that are going to set the tone for the next 10 years. First is
the idea of population health that we need to understand how you take care of
large populations, just as we understand how you take care of individual patients.
So, this involves concepts like access to health care, like how do the
underserved obtain health care that's efficient and
effective? How do we do screening in a large population officially, and how do
we convert our understanding of individual patients into general ideas
about how to take care of patients? Another big area for the future is the
idea of precision medicine -- that how you can take enormous data sets on
individual patients like their genome, their gut microbiome, their gene
expression profiling, the proteomics, their metabolites, and how all that data
that can possibly combine to get more insights into diagnosis and therapy.
It takes a completely different way of handling data, for which we need our
colleagues in computer science and informatics in order to interpret this
and learn from it. And the goal would be that each data
set make makes you smarter, makes you better understand your individual
patient, so you can direct very precise care for each individual patient.
I think the last 10 years were the most exciting at the UC San Diego Health Sciences,
except the next 10 years. The next 10 years is going to be
the best ever.