Your medical school may be suffering from ill health By Avery Comarow For more than 15 years, the medical center ignored students' complaints about the sad state of the instructional facilities. The library's computer system was hopelessly obsolete, and the library itself had no bathrooms or air conditioning. Fed up, students circulated a petition in late 1998 demanding action.
Some institutions seem destined to vanish, and soon.
Robert McDonald, partner in charge of national health care strategy for consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, believes that as many as a fourth of the country's academic medical centers will merge or declare bankruptcy within the next five years. Its teaching hospital is slated for takeover this summer by a regional health system, with yet-unknown consequences for medical students and residents. In March 1999, Mount Sinai Medical Center in Cleveland cut medical students adrift from their clinical rotations when the hospital's ownership filed for bankruptcy and recast Mount Sinai as a nonteaching facility. And in 1998, MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia faced near-certain shutdown after its parent health system folded. Such stories, and others still to be written, are a consequence of giant changes in the U.S. health care system.