From the Director

 


Welcome to Momentum
Momentum is designed to be a vital platform through which we can chronicle, analyze, and discuss the changes we are making - as we undertake them.

I am very pleased to introduce Momentum, a new publication of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.

The center is now addressing the challenges of a new era in health care. We are engaged in center-wide strategic planning in each of our missions. Already we are implementing many innovative programs and processes designed to strengthen our role as one of our nation's pre-eminent health sciences centers.

This work is exciting, but it is also difficult. Successful change requires strong individual commitment to conceiving and implementing new and sometimes untested initiatives. It requires a dynamic, supportive environment. And it requires strong and open communication within and between all the people and units working to meet our goals.

Momentum is designed to be a vital platform through which we can chronicle, analyze, and discuss the changes we are making - as we undertake them. In Momentum, you will find less after-the-fact reporting about what has happened and more up-to-the-minute discussion and analysis of our planning and our progress to date.

I have asked our editors and writers not just to look at what we are doing, but to look into it. Talk to the people involved and the people affected. Dig into the issues that are most important to our success:


  • What change is contemplated or being undertaken?
  • How does it help our people improve their efforts?
  • How does it affect our patients? Our students? Is our process good? Are we accomplishing what we want to? What we need to?
  • Can we showcase exemplary efforts and innovative solutions that have broader interest or application?
  • Can we get honest feedback and present differing perspectives so that we can understand our work and its impact in the fullest and most meaningful ways?
In this Issue

From the Director

Closing the AIDS Loop

Stronger Together
In Changing Times


David Blake: Catalyst
for Strategic Planning


Making Primary Care
a Primary Focus


Meeting the Needs
of the Elderly


High Stakes under
the Gold Dome


Clinic Restructuring Further
Unites Emory Healthcare


In Praise of Staying Focused

 


I believe we can do this - and more.

Over the coming months and years, the center will be moving forward vigorously in each of our mission areas: research, training, and patient care. Our forward momentum can be sustained only by working together - as much as possible as masters of our own destiny - with a commitment to excellence in everything we do.

The weekly Momentum Update that many of you now receive by e-mail provides timely, ongoing reports of our progress, and it will continue to do so. This quarterly Momentum has a different, perhaps unique, mission: to be a vigorous forum for dynamic reportage and assessment that can help each of us be better change agents in our quest to be the best. And a third leg, our Momentum Web page, archives both the publication Momentum and our weekly e-mail. (No plans yet for Momentum, the movie!)

Momentum's success will be judged by how well it helps each of us participate constructively in charting and building our common future. Should you find Momentum anything less than a useful and compelling resource, I hope you will let me know.


Michael M. E. Johns

 


Copyright © Emory University, 1998. All Rights Reserved.
Send comments to the Editors.
Web version by Jaime Henriquez.