Linking health services research to education at an academic health center

Academic health centers (AHCs) face numerous challenges as they prepare students, housestaff, and faculty for the rapidly changing health care environment. An already overburdened curriculum makes it difficult to provide medical students with skills in outcomes assessment, health economics, clinical decision making, epidemiology, and basic statistics. Practicing physicians may find it difficult to expend the time and resources needed for degree programs in public health or the evaluative clinical sciences. AHCs may need to tap into existing resources in the health evaluation sciences, as Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) has done by establishing the Emory University Center for Clinical Evaluation Sciences. Although the Center's primary missions are to be an analytical resource for Emory's health care delivery system and to promote health services research across the university, the authors illustrate its potential as a resource for training medical students, housestaff, and faculty in the evaluative clinical sciences.