Health Sciences Organizational Design and Operational Assessment

IU’s health sciences schools and programs had highly complex and variable organizational structures, distributed across the main university campus in Bloomington, a separate campus in Indianapolis (operated in concert with another public university), and 10 regional campuses across the state. The array of health sciences included schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, optometry, social work, health and human sciences, and two schools of public health. IUSOM is Indiana’s exclusive allopathic medical school and the largest medical school in the United States, with a total enrollment of over 1,400 students and nearly 2,000 full-time faculty.

Reporting relationships among the deans of each health science school were inconsistent; some deans reported to campus chancellors, while the SOM dean reported to the IU president. The SOM dean also held the role of executive vice president for university clinical affairs, a position that served as a key liaison to IU Health but with no significant oversight or accountability for the health sciences overall. Additionally, IU maintained a clinical affairs committee that included each health sciences dean, but this committee met infrequently with minimal impact, and IU maintained no comprehensive strategic plan for the health sciences.

IU engaged ECG to evaluate the current state of health sciences and develop detailed recommendations to help the health sciences programs achieve optimal performance.

ECG partnered with university leadership to assess the organizational design and performance of the health sciences, a process that included: 

• Interviewing dozens of stakeholders to obtain their input on existing performance, organizational objectives, trends, and potential alternative organizational models.
• Assessing the sources and uses of funds for each health sciences school, and comparing their financial performance and available resources.
• Designing comparative groups of current and aspirational peers for each health sciences school based on reputation, size and scale, and additional qualitative and quantitative factors.
• Conducting a comprehensive comparison of each health sciences school to its peers using publicly available information, proprietary data sets, ECG internal benchmarks, and national averages.
• Presenting profiles of other health sciences centers to demonstrate the organization, structure, and performance of successful national models.
• Identifying areas of duplication and potential inefficiency within the health sciences schools.
• Proposing a range of alternative health sciences models for IU and presenting the notable features, benefits, and risks of each.

ECG developed recommendations for a revamped health sciences framework intended to improve efficiency, allocation of institutional resources, measurement of success, and alignment of goals and objectives across the schools. The comprehensive final report included key findings and opportunities for improvement—both for health sciences as a whole and for each individual school. Our recommendations addressed organizational structure, geographic distribution of schools, strategic planning, and mission support and funds flow. We also developed a detailed implementation timeline for these recommendations.

One of our key recommendations was the development of a separate and distinct IU health sciences center in Indianapolis. Following the final report, the IU Board of Trustees approved the separation of IU’s campus in Indianapolis from its public university partner. IU further announced it would enhance the integration of its science, SOM, and other allied health science schools, and expand the number of health science students, including doctors and nurses.

Indiana Governor Eric Hocomb lauded IU’s changes as “a bold move” that “will create a transformational change across Indiana's landscape and far beyond.”