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AAMC Mission Statement

The mission of the Association of American Medical Colleges is to improve the health of the public by enhancing the effectiveness of academic medicine. The AAMC pursues its mission by assisting academic medicine's institutions, organizations and individuals in carrying out their responsibilities for:

Educating the physician and medical scientist workforce;
Discovering new medical knowledge;
Developing innovative technologies for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease;
Providing health care services in academic settings.

Academic medicine is a unique resource in American health care. It is responsible for producing each new generation of physicians, creating new knowledge, and caring for patients, who often have special needs. The three elements of academic medicine — education, research, and health care — are highly interdependent in both their missions and financing. As the United States undergoes a transformation of its health care system, it is critical to deal with the consequences of those changes for academic medicine.

Medical schools and teaching hospitals have unique and valuable roles in the nation's health care system. Their contributions depend on multiple sources of financing, each of which is increasingly constrained. This simultaneous challenge to all sources of support jeopardizes the ability of medical schools and teaching hospitals to meet their societal commitments.

If changes in the health care system constrain the flexibility within the patient care payment system to support academic medicine's other missions, then the reorganized health care system must make explicit provision for new and dedicated funding mechanisms for these missions. Support must be provided to allow academic medicine to continue:

Educating the world's best physicians and assuring that the physicians in training, as well as those now in practice, are prepared for the nation's evolving health care needs;
Conducting research that will determine the most cost-effective and efficacious of present therapies, thus arming future physicians with the tools to reduce human suffering and lower the costs of health care even further;
Providing much needed specialized services such as trauma care, burn units, and transplantation centers; and
Caring for those who remain uninsured during a transition period to universal coverage or for those who may never be adequately incorporated into the health system.

The academic medicine community recognizes that these are complex and difficult issues to resolve in parallel with all of the other changes occurring in the health system. These issues cannot be resolved simply by setting medical schools and major teaching hospitals apart from the rest of the system to "protect" them. But it is imperative for policymakers to recognize that treating academic medicine as just another provider, no different from the rest, will have the unintended effect of weakening the nation's health.