Value of Academic Medicine

Take any treatment or cure that is standard practice today and, chances are, it can trace its roots to an academic medical center like the one at University of Minnesota.

Academic medical centers are a hotbed of innovation, directly responsible for the medical breakthroughs that constantly redefine health care. They consist of university hospitals and patient care clinics working alongside medical and health sciences schools.

In Minnesota, academic medicine is embodied in the partnership between the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center and Medical School, Fairview Health Services, and University of Minnesota Physicians.

We’ve discovered and applied ground-breaking treatments in a wide variety of specialties. In fact, since the partnership began nearly a decade ago, University of Minnesota Medical Center has achieved several world firsts in living-donor transplantation and stem-cell therapeutics.

Benefits of academic medicine

Academic medical centers like ours take on a broad range of challenges -- from developing ways to prevent common illnesses, to understanding and treating the most complex and rare diseases in the world.

Patients at our partner hospitals and clinics benefit from:

• The most advanced diagnostic and treatment capabilities available
• Multidisciplinary clinical care teams
• Treatment options unavailable in community hospital settings
• Clinical trials that offer hope to patients diagnosed with conditions once thought of as "untreatable"

The value of clinical trials

Clinical trials strive to find solutions to some of life’s most complex conditions, diseases, and disorders. They are modern medicine’s answer to the questions “why?” and “how?”

At the University of Minnesota, we offer hundreds of clinical trials for patients with nowhere else to turn. These breakthrough treatments deliver potential solutions for deadly diseases previously deemed untreatable.