Advancing our mission, vision and values for a healthy society

The enormous challenges we’re facing in health care — a lack of prevention, runaway costs, inequitable health outcomes, to name a few — are really about caring for people. How can we help them live healthy lives and prevent disease? How can we ensure that everyone can access safe, effective, high-quality care? How can we prepare a diverse, inclusive, highly adaptive workforce capable of transforming care delivery?

Rosalind Franklin University’s mission and our quest — to improve the wellness of all people — jumps off each page of this Year in Review. We’re making the case that health professions education and clinical practice are closely tied to health outcomes, and that the health and biomedical professionals we’re educating today embody the promise of change.

That’s why we’re creating educational environments where people of different genders and from diverse lived experiences can thrive. Working in highly collaborative teams, with a common goal and shared values, they will help lead the shift from sick care to well care and toward a new future of good health and well-being.

We also draw the connection between a pervasive lack of prevention and resulting health inequities that cost billions in dollars, lives and lost productivity. Thought leaders continue to warn that a lack of prevention drives health inequities that in turn drive healthcare spending, a reality that demands new models of health promotion and maintenance.

We need new community- and population-based approaches aimed at helping people be healthy, helping people avoid common chronic diseases, like type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart failure that develop over years of poor eating, tobacco and alcohol use, poor sleep and lack of exercise.

That shift is too big to tackle alone. We’re working with trusted partners who share our vision and together we have to persevere in finding solutions. Our many community and health system partnerships and the innovations in care delivery they support are also featured in these pages. Together, we’re expanding health services aimed at prevention. We’re helping to build our region’s health workforce capacity. We’re reaching vulnerable but resilient populations where they’re at and offering the support and care they need.

We have the tools to solve our healthcare delivery challenges — population health, lifestyle medicine, community partnerships and new digital technologies that can make it easier to be healthy. The future will continue to give us new tools. RFU is committed to the deep collaboration and the continual building of trust needed to create the change that can help all people live healthier lives.

Wishing you the best of health,

Weihang (Valerie) Chai, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, leads the Center for Genetic Diseases.

Progress toward gender equality in health care requires systems to work together for a more equitable future. Education. Social services. Workplace policies. Each cog is integral to the outcomes of our overarching goal: advancing the health of our communities. We are committed to achieving health equity, to fostering a diverse and inclusive academic environment and healthcare workforce, and to increasing representation of women across circles of influence where they can affect important decision-making.

In 2016 we launched our most high-profile effort to raise awareness of the opportunities and challenges for women in health and biomedical professions, the annual Women in Science and Healthcare Symposium (WiSH).

An homage to our namesake, Dr. Rosalind Franklin, whose crucial role in the discovery of DNA was long overlooked, WiSH has examined powerful topics, including implicit gender bias, the impact of climate change on women’s health and sexual harassment in the workplace.

“WiSH has leveraged our identity as the first U.S. medical institution to be named for a woman scientist,” said Lise Eliot, PhD, founding chair of the symposium and professor of neuroscience, and a nationally recognized expert on brain and gender development.

“Yes, we’ve made progress, but there is still considerable bias and cultural norms that hamper women’s success,” Dr. Eliot said. “We’re bringing those to the fore, both for our students’ benefit and for the biomedical science and healthcare communities, where people are confronted with these issues every day, but may not have the research base to understand. We bring the social science and economic research into a lively forum to stimulate discussion, reflection and change.”

It’s well documented that gender and ethnic diversity improves performance in many ways, including better decision-making. Diverse teams are more adaptive, creative and innovative. Healthcare studies show that when diverse teams provide care, patient outcomes improve. A 2024 paper published in the British Medical Journal reported that teams in which at least 35% of anesthetists and surgeons were women achieved the best results, including 3% lower odds of patients experiencing major morbidity within 90 days of the procedure.

“The more diversity we have, gender and otherwise, the better the outcomes are,” said Chicago Medical School Dean Archana Chatterjee, MD, PhD, the first woman to lead the school and co-founder of the CMS Women in Medicine and Science (WIMS) group. “Female physicians tend to focus more on caring and listening to their patients. Perhaps patients are used to listening to the women in their lives, and this includes their doctors.”

“A diverse healthcare workforce can help improve empathy and trust,” said President and CEO Wendy Rheault, PT, PhD, FASAHP, FNAP, DipACLM, who recounted how a patient struggling with long COVID finally found the care he needed from a clinician of color who said they understood “what it’s like not to be listened to.”

Our many mentorship and development programs, including WiSH, are essential to better health outcomes. Nurturing interest in and knowledge of health equity and related skills development — and philanthropic support of those efforts — is powerful preparation for the forward-thinking health professionals we’re educating who will drive the transformation of our systems of care.

Jasmine Westbrooks-Figaro, MS ’19, RD, LDN, CDCES, co-founder of EatWell Exchange, a nonprofit specializing in culturally sensitive nutrition education and improving access to healthy foods in underserved communities.

Prevention does not pay in our fee-for-service model of health care. Chronic diseases are the leading cause of death, disability and illness in the United States. They’re also the leading driver of healthcare costs, while prevention and public health account for less than 3% of healthcare spending. We need to combine forces to address the upstream causes of poor health, use population and public health strategies, and invest in health promotion.

We’re preparing health and biomedical professionals who will lead a paradigm shift from episodic sick care to value-based care and lifelong health promotion and wellness. Many of the leading causes of death in the United States — heart disease, cancer, stroke, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory disease — are preventable with lifestyle changes.

“Preventing disease is more important, effective and efficient than treating it after it occurs,” epidemiologist Bradley Hersh, MD ’80, MPH, FACP, said in his 2024 Commencement address to RFU graduates. “By investing in prevention, we can create healthier individuals, improve the overall well-being of communities and reduce healthcare costs.”

Our programs in Lifestyle Medicine, Population Health and our planned Master of Public Health are all aimed at prevention and reducing risk factors for common chronic diseases by focusing on lifestyles, environments and community health. In parallel, our Michael Reese Foundation Center for Health Equity Research is working with community groups to close gaps in data and evidence generation that underlie unmet healthcare needs in our region.

We recognize the great need for innovation around primary and secondary prevention, in addition to interventions for chronic disease. We are shaping our educational model with the understanding that collaborative intelligence between humans and AI will drive the future of care, and that the professionals we train must champion increased access to evidence-based prevention and treatment.

Healthcare reformer and RFU Trustee Stephen Klasko, MD, says it will take “nondisruptive creation,” an alternative path to innovation and growth through a reshaping of industry and creation of new demand, to remake health care.

“RFU, as a health professions university, needs to prepare people for what I call health care at any address,” Dr. Klasko said. “It’s not health care at home, it’s not prevention, it’s not primary care, it’s health care at any address. How do we help people thrive without health care getting in the way? How do we partner with technology and the traditional healthcare ecosystem to keep people healthy?”

“It’s true. Prevention is underfunded,” said Mark Pfister, LCHD/CHC executive director and a lecturer at RFU. “One of the problems with prevention is it’s hard to quantify what you prevent. So we’re using our dollars to change the current system of treatment over prevention.

“We’re gathering data to produce the evidence we need to show that prevention of chronic diseases does pay. We’re moving toward the care team concept and a value-based care model. We’re hiring community health workers because we know we can’t control what happens outside of our four walls — and that’s what drives health outcomes.”

The integration of AI technologies into health care is transforming interprofessional practice and systems of care. We need thoughtfully educated collaborative teams to drive the transformation, to integrate and deploy AI responsibly, and to shape the kind of care the future demands: empathetic, patient-centered, safe and affordable. We must educate clinicians and scientists who will partner and communicate with AI, and with their patients, populations and communities, to improve the experience of care.

RFU is committed to the expansion of assistive technologies powered by AI across its many health and biomedical professions programs. Our planned 20,000-square-foot virtual health system will integrate simulation-based training, emerging technologies and artificial intelligence tools to prepare an interprofessional healthcare workforce that can adapt to rapidly changing and increasingly complex healthcare environments.

We are preparing future professionals to work in collaborative teams that use information technology and innovative approaches to address longstanding health system challenges around coordination of care, wellness promotion and patient safety. Assisted by health technologies and AI, our graduates will work to improve clinical decision-making, collaborative care and patient outcomes.

While AI is showing great promise in drug development, the automation of routine tasks and at increasing diagnostic accuracy, it’s best used as a co-pilot in partnership with the clinicians, scientists and patients who train it. AI does not have the capacity to genuinely care. But the efficiencies it enables can help free up time for humans to practice the art of caring: engaging patients with empathy and compassion, fostering trust, guiding decision-making.

AI-powered ambient scribes are already helping to alleviate a common source of burnout — clinical documentation. The technology uses generative AI to transcribe patient encounters, produce an accurate clinical note and automate billing, allowing providers to spend more time on direct patient interaction and health coaching.

The processing power of AI can likewise be used by educators to better understand students’ patterns of reasoning and learning, diagnose areas of struggle and use that information to improve learner-specific coaching, and encourage student self-coaching based on personal performance.

“AI is like a brilliant child that’s able to access all of the information you feed it, but because it lacks the capacity to understand what it’s got, it counts on you to frame the question,” said Moreen Carvan, EdD, vice president for academic and faculty affairs. “It counts on you to have the understanding. You are the thinking partner.

Every interaction we have with AI as educators, as students, must reflect our institutional values — collaboration, justice, respect — or the tool will not grow and develop as an ethical framework.

All AI users are simultaneously educators and learners, an understanding that underscores what it means to educate.

“We are not the final expert of anything,” Dr. Carvan said. “We are constantly learning. That’s the foundation for all health professions education. The goal is to develop a mature person who is willing to adapt and learn constantly, while at the same time applying the tools and frameworks available to advance that education and apply it in practice. AI is our partner.”

Persistent racial and ethnic disparities in health, well-being and life expectancy are inhumane, unjust and unsustainable — costing $320 billion per year. We need multi-sector leadership that seeks to meet the needs of vulnerable populations — people of color, people with low incomes, people who are chronically ill, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people — and others facing barriers to health. We need healthcare teams that seek to learn from and work in collaborative advocacy and partnership with the communities they serve.

RFU faculty and students are engaging at a grassroots level with community members and diverse stakeholders to implement creative strategies that improve the health of vulnerable populations. Efforts that have earned extramural funding include a digital research study addressing mental health challenges of sexual minority adolescents (SMA).

SMA account for one of the most vulnerable populations in the United States, with higher rates of suicide and depression than their heterosexual peers — disparities that are “rooted in exposure to rejection, discrimination and victimization,” said Brian Feinstein, PhD, director of RFU’s Sexuality, Health and Gender Lab.

Dr. Feinstein and his team are working under a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to investigate the effects of sexual orientation-related rejection sensitivity — the expectation of rejection and accompanying feelings of anxiety — on the mental health of SMAs.

Conducted remotely using digital technology, the study is recruiting a diverse cohort of 500 SMAs, ages 14–17, from across the United States, who will complete online surveys for 18 months, including answering questions four times a day for six weeks via an app.

“One of the coolest things is the excitement and engagement of our participants,” Dr. Feinstein said. “They want to see more research in this area and they’re excited to be a part of it.”

Data collection began in April, but evidence of the scope of rejection is beginning to emerge.

“About half of our participants so far are endorsing some experiences of rejection in terms of their day-to-day life,” Dr. Feinstein said. “But we’re also seeing that the percentage of days when people experience rejection isn’t super high. It’s early, but I think there’s a glimmer of hope that not everyone in this vulnerable population is experiencing these sort of rejecting experiences on a regular basis. It will be important to better understand who are the people, the subgroups, who are experiencing rejection more than others.

“Young people from marginalized groups may not have people in their lives or people with shared identities or spaces where they can talk about their experience,” Dr. Feinstein said, noting that participation in the research study gives them a sense of “You are not alone.”

Prevention is a lens through which the members of Dr. Feinstein’s lab approach their work.

“The goal with all health-related challenges is trying to understand people’s experiences with health and risk and protective factors as early in development as possible so that we can intervene before problems set in,” Dr. Feinstein said. “In a healthy society, where we all have the ability to achieve our full health potential, young people of any sexual orientation and gender expression should be able to be who they really are.”

Supported by sustained enrollment demand in Fiscal Year 2024, the university demonstrated financial resilience with an 8.8% growth in net tuition and fees and an 8.8% increase in patient care revenue. We prioritized resources for instruction and student services, while achieving expense efficiencies in institutional support, reflecting a decrease from 20% to 18%. Declines in grants, contracts and philanthropic giving reflect timing variations; these funds remain vital for diversifying revenues. Strategic initiatives, coupled with prudent expense management, are projected to yield savings and operational improvements into future years. These efforts align with the university’s mission and support long-term financial sustainability.

 

 

 

 

 

Rosalind Franklin University’s Board of Trustees is the governing body of our institution, responsible for our mission as well as the financial health and welfare of the university. Our trustees bring a vast knowledge of higher education, law, government, nonprofit management and marketing. The board provides leadership and guidance to RFU while shaping the university’s goals, policies and practices.

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