As an employee of both UMass Chan Medical School and the UMass Memorial Health system, Dr. David McManus has had a front-row seat to the simmering tension between Worcester’s two largest employers.
Now, as UMass Chan’s incoming chancellor, McManus has been tasked with repairing that rift.
Marty Meehan, president of the University of Massachusetts
“I want him to be working hand in glove with the hospital system, and I believe he has the temperament to do that,” said Marty Meehan, president of the University of Massachusetts system, which includes UMass Chan.
Among the many reasons Meehan selected McManus from the slate of three chancellor finalists was his experience and relationships within the medical school and the UMass Memorial hospital system. When the school officially selected McManus on April 7, UMass Memorial President and CEO Dr. Eric Dickson praised the choice in the school’s announcement.
“I look forward to working with Chancellor McManus to strengthen the ties that bind our institutions to achieve even greater feats for academic medicine and the future of clinical care,” Dickson said.
Passive-aggressive competition
The relationship between UMass Chan and UMass Memorial has been marked by years of passive-aggressive competition, Meehan said.
That unspoken tension came to a head in a 2023 legal battle in which the school said UMass Memorial owed it $40 million as part of the 2019 sale of the Shields Health Solutions specialty pharmacy.
At the root of that tension is a common challenge between medical schools and healthcare institutions across the country: competition for limited funding and resources divided between patient care and research, said Dickson.
That interplay will land squarely on the desk of McManus when he becomes chancellor after May commencement. He will succeed Chancellor Dr. Michael Collins, who is stepping down following a 21-year tenure in which he raised $865 million for the school and increased enrollment by nearly 50%.
McManus is poised to repair the institutions’ relationship at a critical time, as both face the significant headwinds of restricted access to federal funding, Medicaid cuts, and a rapidly aging population.
“We need to be supportive of each other for both of the institutions to ride out this period successfully,” said McManus. “If you want the commonwealth to be healthy, UMass Memorial needs to be part of that.”
UMass Memorial employs nearly 21,000 people, including 20,416 in Central Massachusetts as the region’s largest employer. UMass Chan has more than 6,400 employees, including 3,986 in the region, according to data each provided to the WBJ Research Department.
McManus’ track record
Since 2020, McManus has served as professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at UMass Chan’s T.H. Chan School of Medicine and at UMass Memorial.
A graduate of UMass Chan, he founded the school’s Program in Digital Medicine and co-founded UMass Chan’s AI Assurance Lab, securing $140 million in National Institutes of Health funding and publishing more than 400 scientific papers.
As a physician and scientist, McManus’ specialty of integrating artificial intelligence and healthcare gave Meehan confidence he can to lead the institution during a time of immense technological changes in medicine and education, Meehan said. The other two finalists for the chancellor job were Dr. Steven Goldstein from the University of California, Irvine, who was known for increasing the system’s revenue, and Dr. Frances Jensen, a neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who had written a New York Times bestseller.
In 2020, one in six people in the U.S. was age 65 or older, and that percentage is expected to grow, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Due to this aging population, over the course of the next decade, the country is going to experience a 50% to 75% increase in the number of patients with chronic diseases, said Dickson.
“More people are in need of care, and there are fewer and fewer people in the nursing and healthcare profession,” said McManus.
Theoretically, that will require an additional 1,000 hospital beds in Central Massachusetts alone, which is an impossible ask, said Dickson.
Instead, the hospital system will need to rely on decentralized care and remote patient monitoring to provide for its sickest patients, areas Dickson and McManus have already partnered in when they launched UMass Memorial’s Hospital at Home program.
Looking forward, Dickson plans for the school and hospital system to collaborate on creating and testing wearable monitoring devices, especially e-textiles: clothing embedded with sensors for the hearts and lungs. AI will use that data to identify patients’ health problems.
“I see great opportunity to pair that research and innovation piece of the Chan Medical School with that innovation ecosystem of the healthcare system, to almost treat the healthcare system as a learning laboratory,” said McManus.
Finding ways to work together
McManus views the relationship between UMass Memorial and UMass Chan as that of a family.
“When the medical school was founded in the 70s, it was founded with the hospital together as one entity. And so the two have both a joint history, and I would argue, a joint future,” he said.
Traditionally, UMass Memorial hasn’t invested in many UMass Chan research initiatives due to the school’s heavy emphasis on gene therapies, which can take up to 20 years to develop.
“We don't have 20 years, because the population is aging today,” said Dickson.
Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO and president of UMass Memorial Health
By contrast, digital health tools and AI care models can be implemented far more quickly, allowing both institutions to reap benefits in months rather than years, he said.
Moving forward, Dickson said the organizations will emphasize joint investments designed to generate revenue for both sides.
“We're going to find things with a quick return on investment, where you take the knowledge, intellectual capital of the school and the clinical experience of the healthcare system, and you create this synergy,” Dickson said. “That’s the potential for us.”
In 2020, one in six people in the U.S. was age 65 or older, and that percentage is expected to grow, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Due to this aging population, over the course of the next decade, the country is going to experience a 50% to 75% increase in the number of patients with chronic diseases, said Dickson.
“More people are in need of care, and there are fewer and fewer people in the nursing and healthcare profession,” said McManus.
Theoretically, that will require an additional 1,000 hospital beds in Central Massachusetts alone, which is an impossible ask, said Dickson.
Instead, the hospital system will need to rely on decentralized care and remote patient monitoring to provide for its sickest patients, areas Dickson and McManus have already partnered in when they launched UMass Memorial’s Hospital at Home program.
Looking forward, Dickson plans for the school and hospital system to collaborate on creating and testing wearable monitoring devices, especially e-textiles: clothing embedded with sensors for the hearts and lungs. AI will use that data to identify patients’ health problems.
“I see great opportunity to pair that research and innovation piece of the Chan Medical School with that innovation ecosystem of the healthcare system, to almost treat the healthcare system as a learning laboratory,” said McManus.
