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By Darby Kendall

Oregon’s unique offerings have long attracted a creative, educated and value-driven community that has cultivated a culture of innovation. OHSU President Shereef Elnahal, M.D., M.B.A., sees an opportunity to add to that innovation by capitalizing on the emerging sector of bioscience. He believes that OHSU can catalyze a transformation that seats Oregon at the heart of advanced healthcare in the United States.

Here are some highlights from Elnahal speaking at a recent conference on the future of OHSU and the values that will bolster its continued success.

Transcript

What I’m trying to do today is frame the ultimate vision for what OHSU, I think, can be into the future. 

Oregon’s unique offerings have long attracted a creative, educated and value-driven community that has cultivated a culture of innovation. OHSU President Shereef Elnahal sees an opportunity to add to that innovation by capitalizing on the emerging sector of bioscience, and he believes that OHSU can catalyze a transformation that seats Oregon at the heart of advanced healthcare in the United States. Here are some highlights from President Elnahal speaking at a recent conference on the future of OHSU and the values that will bolster its continued success. 

And so the question is, hey, what’s the next step? What can OHSU do next to expand the impact on our patients, families, the science and our mission with education and training of the clinicians of the future?  

I like to say that us being a single entity across all three of these missions, which, by the way, is increasingly rare as far as the structure goes, we are one university, and that confers a real advantage now, when the demand is to get treatments developed as soon as the hypothesis is formed from fundamental science down to translational clinical trials. We are better equipped to do that than many of our competitors because of that one OHSU community. And so why not make Portland and Oregon, overall, the heart of healthcare innovation in the United States. We literally started entirely new fields of medicine and healthcare. We’ve developed cures for some of the most intractable diseases. We have revitalized and built the character of Portland as we know it, as well as all the other places where we are in Oregon, rural Oregon and Eastern, Southern, Klamath Falls, the coast. We are a meaningful presence in these communities. And as one OHSU, which is going to be our mantra, we can make the entire state of Oregon that heart for health innovation.  

We’re launching six values that we believe speak to our ability to realize this vision. The first is compassion. We see the whole person. We see the whole person when we’re dealing with colleagues, when we’re treating each other in debates and conflicts, and, of course, when we are treating our patients and families.  

Integrity, and we have some of the smartest and most effective people in healthcare and the sciences and education, but they also have the character, and they know in their gut when something is right or wrong. And we’re asking folks to manifest what they know is right by living by our values.  

We live by inclusion. One of the things I love about Oregon is it is a place no matter who you are, no matter who you love, no matter how you identify, you are welcome in Oregon. We need to manifest what makes Oregon so special, and I believe when we do that, that’s actually a strategic matter, because every voice on the team is valued, and we make better decisions, and we do things right when everybody on the team feels included.  

Respect, a basic tenet. We lead with dignity. No matter how tough things get, taking a step back and internalizing these values and saying respect matters more than anything else, will also help us in our mission collaboration. We have a lot of great scientists, just one example, who are learning from each other at this conference and may actually collaborate and further their work because they came to this conference and listened to each other. That value manifested will propel our mission in ways that are hard to see now, but will become obvious in the future.  

And one extremely important one to me is adaptability. So, we don’t know what the next few years are going to bring. Things are changing rapidly. AI is revolutionizing healthcare and literally every industry. And the pace of change is unprecedented, no matter whether you’re talking about cultural change, technological change and headwinds to the very traditional academic system, which has had trouble changing over time. I want us to be the most adaptable and change-capable academic health center in the country. We need to build new platforms for scientific inquiry into the future, and that’s what will really differentiate us over time, a repeatable set of processes and systems that allow us to expand entirely new avenues of scientific inquiry.  

Now, what do we mean by platforms for scientific inquiry? One of the really awesome examples we have of that is the Biofabrication Hub. Our Biofabrication Hub is building the next generation of human cancer models. It is getting us away from the need to use animal models where we don’t need to, and it is allowing us to fight cancer with precision engineering and recreating and unraveling the complexity of human cancers in an artificial environment. But what I’m confident in is that we can do this for many, many other areas in science. We can build those next generation platforms, and by corollary, we can realize our vision of elevating Oregon as the heart of health innovation into the future.  

We’re all here for the same reason. Doesn’t matter what your role is, whether you’re a food service worker at OHSU Hospital, Child Life employee at Doernbecher, a scientist, and yes, of course, our clinicians. We’re ultimately here for the patient. We’re here to advance health.