Sounds real 'cute' on paper...

But how will it play out? That's the question...Will we be used as guinea pigs and continue to be pathologized and receive subpar care?

We Can Make the South Side a Model for Health-Care Reform

Eric Whitaker, MD, MPH, vice president for strategic affiliations and associate dean for community-based research, wrote the following op-ed for the April 23, 2009 edition of the Chicago Tribune.

I was born in a legendary Chicago hospital that has nearly disappeared.

Michael Reese Hospital was once a showcase of the South Side, a first-class research center that served as a beacon for people from many walks of life. Scientists there helped develop electrocardiography, found new links between cholesterol and heart disease, and did groundbreaking work on insulin. When my mother studied to be a nurse, Reese and Cook County Hospital were the only teaching hospitals in town that welcomed black trainees.

Once I dreamed of practicing medicine at Reese. Now the hospital is bankrupt and will close soon. The last time I drove past, all the lights were out.

Reese's fate gives a sense of the vast health-care challenges in underserved areas like the South Side. Tight financial resources here can make it difficult to sustain advanced-care centers such as Reese and the University of Chicago Medical Center, where I work.

Yet my home community desperately needs the best care available. We contend with widespread poverty and some of the nation's highest rates of chronic disease -- diabetes, hypertension, asthma.

We don't have to accept a future of declining community health and struggling hospitals. If we take the right steps now, the South Side could become a national model for how to build an innovative and sustainable health network. We'll need to put aside institutional turf and accept that no single medical center can meet all of our patients' needs.

The best strategy would combine the strengths of many South Side centers and treat them as one "virtual hospital," which patients can access in different locations depending on their medical needs.

Such an approach makes economic as well as medical sense. It would sustain the area's network of community hospitals and clinics, and connect low-income patients with the primary care they need to prevent serious complications of chronic conditions. My hospital has worked on this through the Urban Health Initiative, which strives to match patients with local clinics and physicians.

But we will not reach any of our goals without restoring trust within the community. Our patients don't always trust that if we refer them to a different institution, they will still get care of the highest quality. And hospitals often distrust each other, fearful that the patients they refer elsewhere will never come back.

The hospital where I work has not always been a good partner for this kind of collaboration. The U. of C. has been seen as detached from its medical neighbors and at times arrogant and overly competitive.

I think we can change those views and build a true partnership on the South Side. More faculty and residents from my hospital are fanning out to smaller centers where they are sharing knowledge and helping new groups of patients. Many of our patients who voluntarily transfer to those centers report greater satisfaction than they had at our hospital. That's humbling, and a sign that we can learn a lot from our neighbors.

Together we can learn more about our patients' unique health problems. The health disparities that exist between rich and poor are a huge problem for Chicago, yet we still don't know enough about why they persist. For example, why are diabetic adults on the South Side nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized than diabetes patients in the rest of the state? We suspect that diet, genetics and a lack of preventive care all play a role, but we don't know the specifics -- or how to correct the problem.

That's why a coalition of groups from around the city will soon embark on the South Side Health and Vitality Study, an ambitious effort to understand and begin remedying these glaring gaps in health outcomes. We want to create a resource that patients and researchers will draw on for decades, much as the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts has shaped ideas about cardiovascular disease.

No single hospital will solve the South Side's health disparities by working within its own four walls. And no center here can thrive without strong affiliations -- that's one lesson of Reese's demise. But if we learn to trust one another and work together, we can help our patients and prevent more hospital lights from flickering out.