Impact of global medicine on urologic education

Collaborative and academic partnerships between institutions in North America and those in resource-limited nations are a burgeoning trend. Leveraging the academic quality and outcomes-based infrastructure of university medical centers to increase surgical capacity in regions where urologic disease burden is immense offers potentially bilateral opportunities. Host institutions benefit from exposure to contemporary surgical approaches, while the surgical volume enables larger-scale collaborative outcome studies and exposure of residents-in-training to rare pathophysiology. This article surveys this growing trend in globalizing health care specific to urology, and the development of a program focused on urologic education at a tertiary referral center in India.