Mission & Vision

Mission

UW Medicine has a single mission: To improve the health of the public. The 30,000 members of our community advance this mission through the excellence of their work in patient care, medical education and research. 

Vision

UW Medicine will provide: a care experience for patients and their families that helps them achieve their personal goals for wellness and disease management; an educational environment for health professionals, students and trainees that prepares them for leadership in their professional careers; and a research enterprise for scientists that enables them to advance medical knowledge and clinical innovations with groundbreaking discoveries.  

Values

We treat people with respect and compassion. 

We embrace diversity, equity and inclusion. 

We encourage collaboration and teamwork. 

We promote innovation. 

We expect excellence. 

UW Medicine’s values are also described in our Policy on Professional Conduct.

Goals and strategies

Provide high quality, safe, service-centered care to all patients and families while controlling the rising cost of healthcare.   

• Collaborate with patients and families to incorporate their health preferences in shared decision-making about treatment plans.   

• Accomplish a care transformation agenda that standardizes care, broadens our focus to populations of patients, fully develops the medical home, better uses data to drive clinical care, focuses on healthy as well as “sick” care, and introduces innovative technology only after demonstrating its value. 

• Use timely, accurate information to support the UW Medicine patients are first approach to improving health.  

• Build key clinical programs, networks and affiliations, including the UW Medicine Accountable Care Network, to improve health. 

• Cultivate philanthropic relationships to build and expand patient care programs.  

Sustain health before and after illness for individual patients and populations.   

• Prevent disease, promote health and reduce the burden of chronic illnesses through population management. 

• Engage in community outreach to encourage healthy behaviors and lifestyles. 

• Promote health through the use of innovative technology. 

Be an international leader in providing high quality, cost effective medical education and training. 

• Foster a culture of continuous active, experience-based learning throughout UW Medicine.  

• Lead the development of innovative approaches, such as simulation, to support lifelong, team-based learning for all health professionals. 

• Enhance relationships with key stakeholders to maintain and increase support for undergraduate and graduate medical education across the five states in the WWAMI region: Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.  

• Utilize continuous process improvement in education programs to maintain accreditation standards.  

• Cultivate philanthropic relationships to support medical education programs and scholarships.  

Improve health locally and around the world by accelerating the application of research findings to the clinic, bedside and populations. 

• Build on UW Medicine’s history as a home for major discoveries in basic science and clinical research that improve health. 

• Enhance the learning experience for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees; support interdisciplinary education.  

• Develop state-of-the-art research facilities, institutes and interdisciplinary programs.  

• Enhance global health research and education through the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the Department of Global Health. 

• Establish the Precision Medicine Institute in partnership with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital. 

• Promote the use of clinical trials to develop more efficient, cost-effective approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment. 

• Cultivate philanthropic relationships and commercialization opportunities to support research and innovation. 

Be a national model for healthcare equity and work to reduce health disparities. 

• Collect and analyze data to understand where disparities exist. 

• Develop and implement strategies to promote healthcare equity for all patients regardless of race, ethnicity, language, religion, spiritual practice, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and socioeconomic and mental/physical status. 

• Decrease implicit bias.  

• Work with the communities we serve to better understand their needs. 

• Improve workforce diversity. 

• Establish training resources, programs, events and policies to create an environment that supports diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Maintain trust and confidence in UW Medicine’s mission and effectiveness.    

• Provide clear, accurate and timely communications to patients and their families, employees, referring providers and other stakeholders.  

• Create a workplace environment that makes UW Medicine the Employer of Choice for top talent at all of our entities.  

Last update: November 2016