Harnessing New Tools to Support Our Teams and Advance Our Mission
VITALS – UW Medicine – July 30, 2025
We are excited to announce two new initiatives to help support our people, expand patient access, improve outcomes, increase efficiencies, produce cost savings, accelerate research and position UW Medicine for the future.
As an integrated learning health system, one of the things that sets us apart is our innovative mindset. That spirit is a cornerstone of our mission to improve the health of the public, for all people. Given the recent reductions to state and federal funding, it’s even more important that we strategically harness new technologies to support our efforts. We know our teams cannot work any harder than they already do, so we must provide the tools to help us work smarter. These two initiatives will do that.
The Clinical Additive Manufacturing Program (CAMP) will integrate cutting-edge 3D printing technologies into clinical care, foster new research and provide educational tools for the UW School of Medicine and the rest of UW Medicine. This program will reduce our reliance on external vendors and decrease costs of critical healthcare devices, while supporting more personalized patient care.
The Innovation Core will be a strategic hub to unite and advance the innovative discoveries and improvements happening across UW Medicine. The new initiative seeks to integrate and harness efforts across our research enterprise, care delivery system and teaching programs. It will enable us to accelerate the promising innovations of tomorrow into real-world pilots today and build pathways to integrate successful models system-wide. The Innovation Core will ensure the responsible, ethical and equitable use of new technologies, including AI, with benefits across our enterprise, from direct patient care to the critical services that support our work behind the scenes.
 Robert M. Sweet, MD, FACS |
Clinical Additive Manufacturing Program (CAMP)
Housed within the Department of Surgery under the Division of Healthcare Simulation Science, CAMP will provide access to advanced 3D modeling and printing capabilities. It will enable UW Medicine care teams to deliver highly personalized care through the development of patient-specific implants, anatomical models and surgical guides. This shared resource will be available to all departments in the UW School of Medicine and will also serve clinical teams across our health system and the larger UW community.
- Support innovative treatment strategies that offer increased precision and improved patient outcomes.
- Provide researchers with access to fabrication tools that can accelerate innovation, enable new lines of investigation and strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration.
- Enhance informed consent communication with patient-specific anatomic models, giving patients a three-dimensional, tactile understanding of procedures.
- Support immersive, hands-on learning for both medical and non-medical trainees, including students in engineering and the health sciences.
Innovation Core
The Innovation Core is the result of considerable work over the last two years to position UW Medicine to leverage AI technology in a responsible way, by standing up system-wide processes and guidance for the responsible and ethical use of these tools in the healthcare setting.
Innovation is happening everywhere at UW Medicine, from researchers leveraging AI to scan images for information about disease to clinicians designing the hospital of the future and administrators rethinking how systems work. In recent months, we’ve explored a range of tools aimed at empowering our employees to work more efficiently and focus on essential tasks. We’re using ZoomAI to generate meeting notes during employee calls, piloting ambient listening technology to document notes during patient visits and even evaluating ways to use AI to assist with processing patient referral documents, to cite a few examples.
The Innovation Core will ensure our efforts are aligned with UW Medicine’s strategic priorities and benefit the communities we serve, especially those that are historically underserved or geographically remote.
The Innovation Core will help UW Medicine advance its efforts to:
- Enhance research, improve collaboration and speed discovery that can transform clinical care and personalized medicine.
- Streamline burdensome, time-consuming tasks in healthcare and its operations to increase efficiency and improve the well-being of our clinicians, trainees and other employees.
- Expand access to care and reduce barriers for patients and better serve rural and remote communities by delivering virtual and hospital-at-home care.
- Redefine the future of medical education; training those who will be practicing in completely transformed clinical and research environments in the near future.
Our mission to improve the health of the public is a bold one; it requires us to continuously search for new and better ways of doing the work we do. These two initiatives will help us to galvanize many inspiring efforts already under way across our enterprise and will also serve as catalysts for new ideas, so we can make the most of emerging technologies as we work together to shape the future of UW Medicine.
Sincerely,
Alexander Chiu, MD (He, Him, His)
Executive Vice Dean, UW School of Medicine
Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs,
University of Washington
Brad Simmons (He, Him, His)
President, UW Medicine Hospitals & Clinics
Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs,
University of Washington
Anneliese Schleyer, MD, MHA (She, Her, Hers)
Chief Medical Officer, UW Medicine
Vice President for Medical Affairs,
University of Washington