M Health Fairview: An aligned academic health system.

BACKGROUND: The aim of this article is to familiarize the reader with one system's approach to creating an aligned academic health system that facilitates delivery of academic health care in community hospitals. METHODS: A wide variety of approaches to this challenge include viewing the community facilities as strictly feeders to the academic centers with no shared governance, to viewing them as branding opportunities with aligned governance, to a more integrated model such as ours, and to creating exclusive centers of excellence in the community facilities by consolidating services initially dispersed across competing hospitals into one center. RESULTS: We leveraged service lines and domains to standardize care across all hospital settings which facilitated delivery of complex tertiary care in community hospitals, thus increasing capacity in the Academic Medical Center for complex quarternary care. CONCLUSION: Through creating a more completely integrated, patient centric health system that leverages the community partners we minimized the need for people to travel from their community hospitals to the Academic Medical Center while still ensuring they received the expertise of a leading academic institution.