Sandler Foundation offers $15 million challenge gift to fuel health care innovation at Stanford University, encouraging others to give
Sandler Foundation has provided a $15 million challenge gift to Stanford University to develop innovations in care delivery that will sustainably moderate the nation’s health care spending growth and improve health.
The gift accelerates the development of Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC), directed by Arnold Milstein, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine and nationally recognized innovator in health-care innovation and policy. The center, the first of its kind to primarily address health-care affordability, mobilizes teams of young scientists in medicine, engineering, and behavioral sciences to target major categories of care—such as for cancer and surgery—that consume a disproportionate share of U.S. health spending. CERC researchers design and demonstrate more efficient paths to clinical excellence, so patients enjoy better health at lower cost.
Donor support is allowing us to create a unique trans-disciplinary science center, dedicated to innovations in the delivery of care to boost the yield to Americans from their large investment in health care.
Additional gifts totaling $30 million from other donors, coupled with programmatic progress, will enable CERC to meet the Sandler challenge and receive funding required for national impact. So far, two-thirds of these additional gifts have been committed by donors who believe CERC’s trans-disciplinary approach will be needed to solve one of our nation’s seemingly intractable challenges.
Milstein met Herbert Sandler, co-founder of the San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation, several years ago and discovered a shared interest in more rapidly improving the national affordability of clinical excellence.
“Our foundation bets on outstanding leaders with a strong drive, compelling vision, and successful track record of targeting major national problems and advancing solutions that significantly improve people’s lives,” Sandler said. “We found such an innovator in Professor Milstein and believe his leadership will materially improve the national affordability of high-quality health care for all Americans.”
Herb and his late wife, Marion, founded Sandler Foundation in 1991 with the goal of strengthening the progressive infrastructure, exposing corruption and abuse, advocating for vulnerable individuals and the environment, and advancing scientific research. The impact of the foundation’s support is seen through the investigative journalism organization ProPublica, the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Responsible Lending, as well as its support in the sciences, including the Public Library of Science, the American Asthma Foundation, and innovative neurosciences and biomedical research.
They turned their attention to Milstein’s center, founded in 2011 after he joined Stanford. His focus on innovations in care delivery began in the mid-90s at the Permanente Medical Group. Ten years later he led a team that originated the concept of the “ambulatory care ICU,” designed to reduce costly health crises among medically fragile patients living at home. The model was tested among Boeing employees in Seattle and hotel employees in Atlantic City. It reduced health-care spending, improved workers’ health, and sparked spontaneous letters of thanks to employers from employees. It is now being used and refined nationwide, including at Stanford Hospital’s Coordinated Care Clinic.
Milstein also co-founded the Leapfrog Group and the Pacific Business Group on Health, a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and large non-profit employers such as Stanford University and the University of California that collaborate on their employee health-care purchasing strategies and on public policy advocacy to improve the value of health spending. Leapfrog, for example, propelled a series of patient safety advances into successful mainstream use by U.S. hospitals.
“If we produce high-quality care wastefully, it chokes investment in K-12 education, basic research, wage increases for American workers, and the global competitiveness of American employers,” Milstein said. “Reducing waste in health-care delivery also allows us to afford continuing health dividends from remarkable advances in biomedical technology.”
Each year, Milstein assembles new teams of CERC research fellows who work with faculty from various disciplines, including engineering, business, the social sciences, and medicine. CERC's deepest ongoing cross-school partnership on campus is with the artificial intelligence lab at the engineering school. CERC convenes its incoming fellows via a “boot camp” environment to equip the teams to develop practical new care methods ready for testing within six months. Their ongoing focus areas include care for cancer, kidney disease, surgical conditions, pediatric-to-adult care transitions, and stroke. This year the team is redesigning care for patients in ICUs and patients struggling with chronic musculoskeletal pain.
CERC has assembled a national network of sites that are now pilot testing and helping to refine its new care methods, including Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, Geisinger in Pennsylvania, CareMore in Southern California, On Lok in San Francisco, Banner in Arizona, UNITEHERE Health in Chicago and Atlantic City, Allina in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Virginia Mason in Seattle, Illinois Children’s Hospital, and Stanford’s adult and children’s health systems.
The Sandler challenge gift and support from other donors are the springboard to recruiting the top health care innovation researchers in the world and enabling Stanford to help solve a significant national problem. "Donor support is allowing us to create a unique trans-disciplinary science center, dedicated to innovations in the delivery of care to boost the yield to Americans from their large investment in health care."
To learn how you can help CERC meet the Sandler challenge, please contact Erik Rausch in Medical Center Development at erausch@stanford.edu or 650.725.1005.
Read more stories about CERC in the news.