From the multiple highways where the sprawling UM medical school campus and affiliate buildings are visible, the towers of the former Cedars Medical Center have been a part of the picture for over three decades, holding their place among the architectural beacons symbolizing emergency care for Miamians and providing quality, comprehensive health care for South Florida and international patients.

Such an excellent location—in the heart of the city of the future and directly across the street from the Miller School—and a history of superb service to patients were important factors that helped the University of Miami’s decision-makers agree last November to buy the facility now known as University of Miami Hospital.

Acquiring the all private-rooms, 560-bed hospital, its myriad medical services, and 1,276 employees is a bold step that gives University of Miami Health System, newly branded as UHealth, a full-scale medical facility.

Certainly, such a large undertaking didn’t happen in a vacuum. In fact, it’s a big part of the Miller School strategic plan that has been fine-tuned under Pascal J. Goldschmidt, M.D., senior vice president for medical affairs and dean, who, since taking the helm in April 2006, has brought in not only additional renowned faculty, but high-ranking administrators experienced in expanding medical schools and hospitals into premier health systems. Such health systems thrive because of their ability to recruit top-notch physicians and scientists who conduct multidisciplinary, cutting-edge medical research and bring the resultant advanced university-based care to patients.

Patients, of course, are the true winners, but the strategy takes into account that a successful UM Hospital significantly aids the goal to propel the University and the Miller School of Medicine into an elite top tier of nationally and internationally recognized academic institutions that have medical schools and academic health systems.

University of Miami Health System includes the new full-service hospital, Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. Additionally, the school has a physician practice in Kendall and has opened physician practices and a newly expanded branch of UM/Sylvester in Broward County; in Palm Beach County there are medical practices as well as the Miller School’s regional campus on the Boca Raton main campus of Florida Atlantic University.

“If you look at the university-based medical centers around the country, all of the top-tier centers have as a fundamental element of their capabilities a teaching hospital the university owns and controls,” says William J. Donelan, vice president for medical administration and chief operating and strategy officer. “What this will do is provide an environment in which faculty physicians and university leaders define the quality, assure performance to the quality standards, and create leading-edge programs in an environment we control.”

As the only university-based hospital in South Florida, UM Hospital will be able to recruit nationally known faculty physicians to blend with the hospital’s highly regarded community physicians who already have extensive relationships in the local area.

With all its parts together, University of Miami Health System is destined to become a medical destination for Floridians seeking the best care from university-based doctors with access to the newest advancements in medicine.

“You hear a lot now about people leaving South Florida to go elsewhere to get health care; our goal is to build up the hospital to a level where no one has to ever leave South Florida for health care,” says William O’Neill, M.D., the Miller School’s executive dean for clinical affairs who, as director of the cardiovascular disease division of a Michigan hospital, grew it into one of the nation’s premier centers for several types of cardiac catheterization.

Donelan, former vice chancellor for health affairs at Duke University and executive vice president and chief operating officer of Duke University Health System, points out that the Miller School already has a wealth of accomplishments to build on. The Miller School’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the number one eye hospital in the United States for the fourth consecutive year, is only one example of the strength that will be leveraged to propel the Miller School and the University to greatness.

“We are talking about an evolutionary process for the University that will not be materially different from the evolution through which other distinguished academic medical centers have developed,” Donelan says. “In many cases, that evolution has occurred over decades, if not hundreds of years. We believe that the evolution of the University of Miami, as it raises its capabilities, can occur in a shorter time frame.”

According to O’Neill, plans are on a fast track for UM Hospital to become the preeminent Florida cardiovascular center for angioplasties, heart failure treatment, stem cell infusion, and minimally invasive heart surgery, including robotic surgery.

Patients should look forward to an expanded sports medicine program that will include a minimally invasive orthopaedic implant program. Urology and executive medicine programs also are among the areas pegged for robust growth.

Significant resources will be put into boosting already existing Miller School programs at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where UM doctors are the attending physicians and run the residency program. Under UHealth, that historic partnership will be further strengthened with an emphasis on centers of excellence that include trauma, transplantation, acute cardiac care and stroke, neurosurgery and spine, obstetrics, and children’s services. The goal is to make the Miami Health District, as the area is known, the locus of the most advanced and complex health care in South Florida.

The UHealth and UM Hospital master plan will ultimately raise the level of care among all hospitals in South Florida, O’Neill notes.

“We’re going to set a new standard. When people see the caliber of academic medicine being practiced throughout a big hospital, others are going to have to raise their standards,” O’Neill says. “That’s what I found in Detroit when we created a fantastic program at a hospital there; others had to raise their level of care. That’s going to happen in South Florida, and patients everywhere will benefit.”