Mass General, Brigham and Women's hospitals promise closer collaboration

Two of Boston’s biggest and most prominent academic medical centers on Wednesday promised to work more closely together, merging clinical departments in what they’re describing as an effort to improve care and appeal to patients from across the country.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are founding members of the same parent organization — Mass General Brigham — but they largely operate independently. Now, health system leaders say, the two hospitals will work to streamline and unify their approaches to medical care in every department including medicine, surgery, pediatrics, cardiology, cancer and more.

The work of combining clinical departments is expected to take several years, and specific plans will be based on feedback from doctors, nurses and other staff, said Dr. Anne Klibanski, president and chief executive of Mass General Brigham.

“This approach will make things better,” she said in an interview. “It will give more access. It will make things go more smoothly. It will help departments to all consider themselves as one.”

Across Mass General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals there are nearly three dozen clinical departments. Through this initiative, the number will shrink to 18 departments spanning both hospitals.

Instead of department chairs at each hospital, as there are today, one person will lead each combined clinical department.

“We need to bring together people to envision what their department is going to look like for the future of MGB and the future of medicine,” Klibanski said. “We've never done that before. We have people working in silos.”

She also announced new leaders for MGB’s big hospitals. Dr. David Brown will move from president of Mass General Hospital to a new role: president of academic medical centers. Dr. Marcela del Carmen will be president of Mass General Hospital, as well as the Mass General physician organization she already leads. Dr. Giles Boland will be president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in addition to the Brigham doctors group he already leads.

These are the latest in a series of changes Klibanski has led aimed at creating a more streamlined MGB network.

The system — formerly known as Partners HealthCare — was founded 30 years ago, but for most of that time, its major hospitals didn’t work closely together. Historically, leaders at Mass General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital were protective of each institution's history and culture — and sometimes, they even competed against each other.

Klibanski, who became CEO of the system in 2019, has worked to undo this. The changes have sometimes been met with resistance, and many leaders have left MGB in the process.

MGB executives have already combined certain departments, including radiology, across their network, which stretches from Boston to Western Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire.

They previously announced plans to streamline cancer care at MGB, following the surprise decision last year by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to break its affiliation with Brigham and Women's Hospital and forge a new partnership with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Patients may not see the results of the latest MGB integration effort right away. But Brown said the goal is ultimately to help patients receive care more quickly. For example, if someone is seeking an appointment with a specialist at Mass General, and no appointments are available, that patient could be connected to a specialist at the Brigham instead.

“What I would anticipate for a patient of the future,” Brown said, “is to experience our care seamlessly across our two academic medical centers, to find us much more easily accessible across our many locations, and to expect that we are performing at the highest possible quality across our system,” he said.

The initiative is likely to eliminate or change certain jobs, but MGB leaders said they are not planning significant job cuts.

“The goal here isn't to get smaller,” Brown said. “The goal here is to get stronger.”

MGB is the state’s biggest health care system, employing about 82,000 people and serving about 2.6 million patients. Its hospitals are affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

It is also one of the highest-cost health care providers in the state. Executives didn’t specify how the new initiative could affect costs.