How do you measure the social mission of a hospital? Researchers from George Washington University looked at “the percentage of graduates who practice primary care, work in health professional shortage areas, and are underrepresented minorities, combined into a composite social mission score.”
The contribution of medical schools to the social mission of medical education varied substantially. Three historically black colleges had the highest social mission rankings. Public and community-based medical schools had higher social mission scores than private and non-community-based schools. National Institutes of Health funding was inversely associated with social mission scores. Medical schools in the northeastern United States and in more urban areas were less likely to produce primary care physicians and physicians who practice in underserved areas.
They also found that school with a lot of NIH funding score low by their measure.
Scoring the lowest in the state — but not the highest for NIH funding — was Boston University – which runs the city’s public hospital. BU, never big on rankings in general since the main campus never places well, had this to say to Fierce Healthcare:
Dr. Karen Antman, dean of Boston University’s School of Medicine, criticized the study authors’ criteria. “I think that they are absolutely right to pay attention to primary care, diversity and service to underserved populations, but I think they’ve got a very, very restrictive definition of social mission,” she told the Boston Globe. “Our mission is actually the Boston Medical Center [considered a safety-net hospital] mission, [which] is service to an underserved population. Medical students come here and in fact stay here for that mission. To be ranked in lowest 20 makes no sense. So we were shocked.”
Here’s what the study reported on NIH funding:
The level of NIH support that medical schools received was inversely associated with their output of primary care physicians and physicians practicing in underserved areas. High levels of research funding clearly indicate an institutional commitment to research and probably indicate missions that value technical medicine and specialization rather than training in primary care and practice in underserved areas. Our findings suggest that schools with smaller research portfolios are more likely to focus on training physicians for community and population needs, although schools in the lowest quartile of NIH funding also scored lower for underrepresented minority output than did schools with higher levels of NIH funding. Nevertheless, we propose that educational ranking systems that place significant weight on research funding may confuse discussions of national educational policy by conflating research values with national clinical needs.
Disclosure: Tinker Ready attended BU and now teaches there.