Brown sees opportunities in Lifespan, CNE merger

The proposed merger of Lifespan and Care New England would aid an ambitious campaign at Brown University to increase the prestige of its medical school and create a world-class hospital and medical research campus in Providence, according to Eli Y. Adashi, Brown’s dean of medicine and biological sciences.
If the merger of two of Rhode Island’s largest health care systems is approved by regulators, the new entity would control nearly three-quarters of the state’s hospitals, including key Brown research and teaching partners. The plans also call for moving Butler Hospital from the East Side to a new facility near Rhode Island Hospital and Brown’s new medical school, which is to be built nearby.
Adashi said the physical proximity and administrative union of Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, Rhode Island Hospital, Women & Infants Hospital and Butler Hospital that would occur under the merger would cause a consolidation of health care services and remove institutional barriers to research, creating an academic medical center comparable to ones in Boston and New York City.
Such a medical teaching and research campus would raise the fortunes of the medical school and the entire city, attracting world-class faculty, increased funding for research and better medical students, he said.
“You get this self-amplifying cascade that other academic medical centers have experienced and capitalized on which we have been deprived of until now,” Adashi said.
Regardless of whether the merger occurs, Brown is in the midst of an ambitious plan to build the stature of its medical school and create a medical teaching and research hub spanning the Rhode Island Hospital campus and the Jewelry District.
When he took the helm of Brown’s 35-year-old medical school in 2005, Adashi inherited a plan announced the previous year to grow the medical school and beef up the university’s life sciences programs.
The mission was aided in January when Warren Alpert, a Providence-born philanthropist who made his fortune in convenience stores, donated $100 million to Brown to build and rename its medical school in his name.
The donation, the largest in the medical school’s history, will pay for the new building to house the medical school, scholarships for medical students, two endowed professorships, faculty recruitment and biomedical research, the school has said.
Since 2004, Brown has spent about $250 million on new life sciences and biomedical faculty and facilities, opening a research building every year in the past three years.
Since Adashi came to Brown, the medical school’s student body has expanded from about 72 to about 100 – a number that could increase slightly once the new campus opens, he said.
Brown’s medical school would still be relatively small – by comparison, Harvard Medical School will have about 770 students this fall, and the Tufts School of Medicine, about 700.
But Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School is already rising in stature, climbing nine notches in the past four years in U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of the nation’s 125 medical schools.
The Warren Alpert Medical School is ranked 34th in the nation, tied with the medical schools at New York University, the University of Rochester and Boston University, and is on the cusp of cracking the top 25 percent most prestigious medical schools in the country.
Adashi said he hopes Brown’s medical school will break into the top 20 percent in his tenure.
Brown is also moving forward with plans to create a new School of Public Health, to be housed on property the university recently purchased on North Main Street. The university hopes to accredit the new school – Brown’s second professional school – sometime next year, and is aiming for an inauguration in 2010 or 2011, Adashi said.
And Adashi said he hopes to later this year announce an initiative called the Research Alliance – a substantial coordination of research efforts between Brown and its affiliated hospitals, overseen by a single dean for research.
“After 35 years of status quo, you’re seeing finally some alignment and some movement in the right direction, which can only bring visibility, economic growth and new opportunities to the city and the state,” Adashi said.