Thomas Zenty

And we found many academic medical centers are located in inner city locations, which by many measures are economically challenged.

Why is our NICU so full all the time?

What we found is that the vast majority of babies who were coming to our NICU were coming from that neighborhood.

And many of the moms were coming to deliver having had no prenatal care whatsoever.

So, again, back to philanthropy, we went out to raise $26 million to create a new outpatient center that would be focused on well-baby care, prenatal care, family care.

We've done a lot of other things that are more community-based.

But at the same time, there has not been a grocery store in that zip code for probably 30 years.

When we were building the center, we said to a developer, would you be willing to build what could ultimately become a grocery store, a 50,000 square foot grocery store on this campus?

Good news is about five months ago, a 50,000 square foot grocery store opened in that location with teaching people how to shop because they never shopped in a grocery store.

They were getting their nutrition from gas stations, convenience stores and fast foods.

So we asked the question, is there an opportunity for us to reduce the number of neonatal intensive care unit admissions?

Well, it's still a little soon to tell because we just opened up the center about 10 months ago.

We've now seen over 55,000 people in that center in 10 months.

That's just but one example.

And other academic medical centers around the country are doing similar things.

So again, the point about emphasizing philanthropy in our world is critically important to further the mission.

One concern that I have is if we're going to drive down the cost of care, which we need to do,

who's going to pay for training the next generation of physician, nurse, pharmacist, speech therapist, fill in the blanks, right?

So we have to make sure that we're going to find ways to offset and have an ability to continue to provide the research and teaching that we need to do.

And I think philanthropy is one way in which we can focus in that regard.