Fireside Chat: Anne Klibanski MD and Tom Mihaljevic MD

Mass General Brigham President and CEO Anne Klibanski MD and Cleveland Clinic CEO Tom Mihaljevic MD joined a conversation introduced by Scott Sperling that explored how major academic health systems can keep evolving under persistent financial, workforce, and research pressures.

Mihaljevic opened with what sounded like a current diagnosis of American healthcare: hospitals under pressure, research funding constrained and reimbursement declining. Then he revealed that the comments were more than two decades old. His point was not that today's challenges are small, but that academic medicine has always operated under pressure and that nostalgia for a simpler healthcare system rarely survives close examination.

Klibanski emphasized research as central to Mass General Brigham's role, pointing to work in areas including genome editing and AI-enabled clinical trial matching. Both leaders also returned to the question of scale. Digital tools and artificial intelligence may finally allow academic medical centers to extend expertise beyond a single geography. Still, Mihaljevic offered an important warning: technology layered onto a fragmented organization can produce a more expensive fragmented organization. The care model has to change with it.