We are expanding our Bilingual Medical Distinction track to increase the number of students with Spanish proficiency, expanding Community Service and Rural Health Distinction tracks, and offering a new Health Care Disparities curriculum in partnership with Tucson’s Commitment to Underserved People clinics. As a result, the Arizona Health Sciences colleges are becoming a significant force in alleviating our state’s health care disparities, including access to care in rural communities and having providers that understand the cultures and speak the languages of our patients.

To address critical health care workforce needs, this initiative is providing an expanded pipeline of providers focused on primary, preventive and prenatal health; advancing interprofessional training of nurse practitioners, allied health and field faculty educators; and creating pre-university pipeline programs through educational offerings focused on medical science.

The University of Arizona Health Sciences is becoming the nation’s most advanced innovator in lifelong interprofessional health education and practice by harmonizing learner experiences across the five Health Sciences colleges through longitudinal, online, onsite and community-based activities. This includes revamping onsite interprofessional education, expanding community- based activities and developing new interprofessional degree offerings.

We are designing, adopting and promoting new loan financing and scholarship options to help make health education more affordable and easier to navigate, including reducing curricular barriers to degree completion that increase student debt. Endeavors within this initiative also are helping to provide new online resources for financial literacy.

The mission of the Center for Regenerative and Restorative Medicine is to catalyze research into a community that is focused on development of cell-based technologies that diagnose disease or heal injured tissue. The objectives rely on research to build living, cell-based therapies or products that enable function through biochemical and physical means that improve human health.

Arizona demonstrates one of the highest incidence rates of melanoma and skin cancer in the world at significant economic impact to our health care systems. This initiative will build the only state registry and database of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer to better assess the full burden of these diseases.

The University of Arizona will develop a strong scientific foundation for the essential knowledge needed to match cognitive health span with human lifespan. Specifically, this initiative will help to understand the neurological changes that occur during normal aging and the links to environmental and genetic factors that drive exceptional cognitive health span, e.g., mapping cognitive outcomes to genotypes and lifestyle, utilize big data techniques and community-based participatory research to determine optimal individual wellness plans.

Personalized Defense addresses issues related to infection, immunity and inflammation caused by microorganisms. We are working toward establishing collaboration channels between different university departments, institutes and centers by creating an Immune-Microbe Interface in Health and Disease (IMIHD) interest group. IMIHD is incentivizing faculty by granting additional resources to hire more postdocs, jump-starting collaborations, supporting microbiome infrastructure and positioning the University of Arizona Health Sciences as a revolutionary real-time point of care leader for inflammatory diseases.

This initiative will support a collaborative effort between Arizona’s three state universities that will focus on the development of precision medicine approaches, drug development and environmental risk abatement to reduce the financial cost and human burden of Valley fever.

We are establishing a roadmap and infrastructure to reliably and securely collect key data sets and data streams from partner institutions and collaborations. This initiative is centralizing data science services, technology and staff for interdisciplinary communities of practice to use data science and analytics methods and increase their expertise in health. With more access to advanced analytics, the University of Arizona Health Sciences is poised to pursue new leading-edge programs, generate inventive pilot programs and bolster future grant submissions.

We are creating an advisory with consolidated research and translation services and develop programming and tools that will increase 4^th Industrial Revolution health sciences research by creating an environment to facilitate the exchange of resources and expertise.

Expansion of the Arizona Telemedicine Program will further its reach into more rural and underserved areas in the state and will increase the capabilities for remote health monitoring and remote education. In addition, the creation of curriculum specific to telehealth will provide additional learning experiences for students across Health Sciences to meet the needs of underserved communities and patients.