The E-Mail Age Supporting Tactics          

1. Ensure that the university’s telecommunication department is preparing for the merging of Internet, wireless and voice systems.
   

2. Maximize use of all core facility equipment.  Increase awareness across the institution.  Ensure there are trained staff and resources for effective service provision.
   

3. Obtain more research funding.
   

4. Provide support for teaching scientists how to work with new and vast stores of data. Specific areas of interest are merging and concatenation of large data sets, and methods to ascertain validity of data in existing data sets are needed.
   

5. Become leaders in our core technologies so that others want us as members in their multi-institutional groups.  Need to invest in key core facilities.
   

6. Position UTMB to participate in large-scale, collaborative, multidisciplinary team-based research.
   

7. Develop a strategy to encourage faculty to engage in technology transfer (start-up companies, licensing, etc.).
   

8. Promote linkage of faculty in supporting multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research.
   

9. Provide hardware and personnel to maintain databases and to teach students and others how to use the databases.
   

10. Establish an "incubator" facility to facilitate development of start-up companies.
    

11. Develop and implement a universal state of the art electronic medical record (EMR).  Integrate the EMR with other UTMB operational and financial systems.  Leverage the EMR to increase UTMB's success in securing clinical trials.
    

12. Improve our communication to external constituencies about what UTMB researchers have accomplished.
    

13. Use e-technology to keep alumni, development board members and friends of the institution connected to UTMB.
    

14. Develop partnerships to share resources and costs.  This could include partnerships with drug companies, other UT components, other business, etc.
    

15. Develop programs to address specific areas of opportunity:

• Outreach to feeder institutions

• Collaboration with UT system

• Targeting specific populations, e.g. alumni

• Maximize and capitalize present institutional strengths in educational technology

• Increase curricula to be offered at distant UTMB sites with attention to and coordination with UT system where appropriate

• Maintain and expand UTMB educational market on state, national and international levels

• Develop web-based laboratory instruction

16. Determine how to meet the identified future workforce needs.
    
17. Develop a global perspective for delivering continuing education.
    
18. Develop a marketing plan to clearly communicate the future institutional vision and direction for curriculum in order to promote faculty support.
    
19. Support and reward the UTMB workforce - make employees feel like a valued part of UTMB at all locations and levels within the institution.
    
20. Enhance the UTMB website (or future innovations as they occur) to be consumer friendly for patients, healthcare providers, and industry.  Identify website requirements using data from consumer focus groups.
    
21. Become a virtual medical information resource.
    
22. Aggressively integrate the Internet into the way UTMB practices and delivers healthcare.
    
23. Implement a web site that serves as a portal to all institutional activities including transaction processing. (E-commerce)
    
24. Redirect internal resources and seek outside partners and external funding to support these programs. For example, selectively identify partners who can work with us to develop financial strategies to deal with providing continuing education.
    
25. Become proactive in developing state, national, and international policies for credentialing and certification.
    
26. Centralize and standardize UTMB's credentialing/privileging practices.
    
27. Develop appropriate infrastructure, rewards and recognition for faculty in the technology driven environment by insuring that the design, delivery, and evaluation of teaching is valued and included in faculty evaluation criteria.

• Provide a chair or professorship to recognize the faculty members who are designing and delivering web-based instruction.

28.  Identify the market (target audiences) for life long learning programs, including who they are, how to recruit them, and how to retain them. For example:

• Focus our marketing strategy to sub-groups, including alumni, housestaff, and health professionals we did not train.
  

• Develop databases and gain access to databases already used in highly focused marketing communications to students and professional organization memberships.
  

• Develop state of the art reference materials and provide the materials and services for free to target audiences, e.g. lifetime email accounts for students/alumni.
  

• Provide electronic access to our materials on a six-month, free of charge basis.
  

• Offer a service for maintaining a comprehensive certification completion database for our alumni. Interface with other institutions to get authenticated, comprehensive, and accurate information.
  

• Set up a subscription-based system for providing the latest information regarding the provider's interests (look at similar strategy for clinical mission).
  

• Investigate the opportunity for partnerships with re-certification agencies or boards to provide certain "niche" preparatory services, such as refresher programs.
  

• Develop a CME program directed at the life-long-learner.
  

• Contract with our students to provide future courses, certifications, etc. for an add-on fee.

• Participate in the state and national strategies to transform health professionals regulation and certification when appropriate.
  

• Develop a process whereby the UTMB Registrar's Office could document continuing education for alumni.