Strategic Plan Introduction

Our country’s health care system is in the midst of a paradigm shift in all its dimensions.

• Enrollment in most health care professions is rapidly expanding, and there is increasing recognition that these groups of future doctors, nurses, therapists and others need to be trained as teams.
• The revolution in genetic science is opening vast new frontiers of discovery and bringing new understanding, preventive approaches, treatments and cures to many diseases.
• New models of service delivery are shifting providers’ focus from “sick care” to disease prevention and health promotion, aligned with new financing arrangements that shift risk to providers and patients.

Academic medical centers – with their traditional commitment to education, research and advanced patient care – are leading this transformation of the health care system. As the state’s only academic medical center, the University of Mississippi Medical Center is also challenged to serve as both the tertiary/quaternary care provider for the state and the safety net provider for Jackson and the surrounding region.

UMMC has made significant strides forward in the last decade, to the point where its educational programs, clinical excellence and research achievements are now regionally and in some cases nationally recognized. On the verge of sweeping change in each of its missions, the time was right for the institution to prepare for its next phase of development by initiating a comprehensive strategic planning process. The resulting plan, presented here, gives leadership a roadmap to navigate environmental uncertainty and take the next steps in enhancing the institution’s ability to meet its strategic goals and objectives.

The development of the strategic plan allowed the organization to build a shared sense of the future direction for UMMC and to define how the UMMC mission will be fulfilled and the vision realized. It identified a prioritized set of major initiatives – new and ongoing – to be advanced over the next five years. Perhaps most importantly, the plan allowed for the engagement of a broad constituency and cultivated a sense of ownership that also generated excitement around the future of UMMC.