UBMD

Dear Colleagues,

All of us know the news, little of which has been positive lately. Yet in this tumultuous time of financial crisis in the State of New York and across our entire nation, it is perhaps even more important now that we find ways to work collaboratively and use our ingenuity to finalize the formation of a unified, multispecialty practice plan—UBMD.

Doing so will allow us to achieve economies of scale in our business operations and administrative efforts and act in concert to provide outstanding care to the citizens of our region and beyond. I am very pleased that both the nascent UBMD Management Council and the UBMD Finance Committee are considering innovative investment strategies and ways in which the current disparate practices can best launch this “mission critical” initiative.

Concurrently, the newly named Great Lakes Health System of Western New York has begun the process to examine extant clinical service lines across the entire gamut of hospitals that it represents, including all of the Kaleida Health sites and Erie County Medical Center and with considerable involvement by UBMD physicians, as well as our community physician partners.

Lastly, it has become increasingly clear that the cornerstone of the bold plan called UB 2020 is the coalescence of the University at Buffalo Academic Health Center in downtown Buffalo, bringing together and thereby fostering our teaching, research, and clinical care missions.

The time horizon for implementing all of these strategic initiatives extends out to the year 2020 and well beyond, but each is being launched now. Together, these three closely interrelated plans will create the opportunity for downtown Buffalo to be a “go to” destination for health science student education and training, cutting-edge research in biosciences, and superb state-of-the-art clinical care, engendering huge synergies between and among these facets of our tripartite academic mission.

Amidst the financial doom and gloom, we should recognize that the way out of financial crisis is not simply cost cutting, particularly across the board, nor is it spending freezes. Rather, investment in each of these initiatives now is the only sound strategy and will assuredly lead to a huge return on investment for our School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, the city, region and the State of New York in the near and far term.

Best regards,

David L. Dunn, MD, PhD
President and CEO, UB Associates