Fed up, students circulated a petition in late 1998 demanding action. It is Stanford University Medical Center, long one of the nation's premier teaching facilities. Premedical students certainly won't spot the warning signs by reading a school's handouts. But checking the Web and asking the right questions of the right people will elicit a surprising amount of information. Coming toll .
Some institutions seem destined to vanish, and soon.
Robert McDonald, partner in charge of national health care strategy for consultants 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. Events of the last two years foreshadow this new reality. 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. Its teaching hospital is slated for takeover this summer by a regional health system, with yet-unknown consequences for medical students and residents. And in 1998, MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia faced near-certain shutdown after its parent health system folded.