Medical School: Academic or Corporate Culture?

Integration between academic medical schools and health systems occurs through mergers with either private or public health system models. Such mergers can result in significant institutional cultural conflicts between academia and the corporate world, which can affect the educational and scholarship missions of the schools. One approach to evaluate institutional culture is by The Competing Values Framework, through which distinct cultural characteristics and preferences can be determined and compared. However, I posit that this framework may not fully capture the differences between the academic vs corporate cultural archetypes. Based on my experience as a medical school faculty member at an institution that has merged with a health care entity, I propose an alternative analytical framework to analyze potential problems in integrating academic cultures into corporate systems. I suggest that decentralization of institutional culture in such mergers should be used to resolve these issues. The resulting stability would benefit the educational and scholarship missions of medical schools. This perspective piece is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis, but rather introduces a heuristic model based on personal experience.