It's impossible for this brief strategic plan, which is designed for all of our stakeholders including our patients, their families, Congress, NIH staff, health researchers and professionals, and the public, to provide a comprehensive description of all the major activities currently underway or those planned for the next few years. For instance, this document contains no information about the ongoing efforts to establish the CC as a more active partner among the important healthcare interests in the National Capital Region. The intramural clinical research program of the NIH will always be in a state of evolution. Capabilities present in the past such as cardiac surgery are no longer present here.
As diseases like childhood leukemia have yielded consistently to therapeutic regimens pioneered in the CC, children afflicted with this malady are most often treated closer to where they live. Only the most unusual and hard to treat cases find their way to the CC. The CC is not, and presumably never will be, a general hospital capable of providing all services and subspecialties. Thus, partnerships with other institutions, both commercial and those connected with other government agencies, will remain of significant strategic importance. Great progress has been made in the development of these relationships in the last few years but there is still much work to do.
In a similar vein, current and planned efforts to more fully engage our patient-partners in their care have not been discussed herein to any significant degree. The most significant near-term effort in this regard is the plan to provide progress notes to most patients through the Patient Portal beginning in July 2019. Only notes written on or after July will be available initially. This effort to engage patients in their own care is just one of a number of efforts to improve patient engagement as a way of improving patient safety, making progress toward the goal of high reliability in the clinical research environment.
While the strategic plan may not be exhaustive, it does highlight the areas where changes will be the most numerous and have the most impact. Enabled by a series of increases in the overall NIH budget and a renewed commitment to intramural clinical research, the CC at 70 will be significantly different than the CC at 65 – improved facilities and infrastructure, a host of new or updated capabilities, and a new generation of staff members prepared to tackle the tough biomedical research issues that face us domestically and globally.