The sponsorship of this symposium brings together the Association of Academic Health Centers (AAHC), the University Hospital Consortium (UHC) and the Academic Medical Center Consortium (AMCC), organizations with missions and goals that provide support to the nation's academic health centers in varying ways. These organizations share a commitment to achieve certain of those goals by catalyzing improved clinical evaluation and health services research in academic health centers and one of their major components, the teaching hospitals. The organizations will plan a 2-1/2 day symposium to be held in early spring 1991, with the major objective of exploring and developing the means to enhance the capacity of academic health centers to improve clinical evaluation, and thus quality of care through the use of a shared data system that could be useful to physicians as well as other health professionals and administrators. The proposed conference will be structured around the clinical information network (CLINET) that has been developed by the UHC. The involvement of interdisciplinary and interprofessional teams of participants through plenary sessions and break-out sessions targeted to the team concept is key to the conference design. Teams from the academic health centers will include the chief executive officers, hospital administrators, and/or faculty responsible for quality improvement programs along with other key decision makers such as the chairperson of the department of medicine. The conference will encourage the design of long-term strategies to disseminate information on clinical evaluation--first through conference proceedings and later through the cooperative action and interface at the home institutions of these selected teams.
