Langone report reveals the promise of a revolutionary new medical discipline

 

New York University’s Langone Medical Center put out its fifth annual Team Science Research Report this year. The first thing to be said about this latest report is, “It’s beautiful.” The second is, “It’s written in jargon-free, crystal-clear prose meant to be read by anyone and everyone.”

The third observation is, “They’re actually doing things like this in medical research?”

The Team Science—2012 Research Report is elegant, readable, short (62 pages), and reveals a world still invisible to most: the rapidly expanding universe of team medical science.

It is for these reasons that the Langone Medical Center is co-winner of the Best Print Publication category in Ragan’s 2013 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

The authors of the report chose six teams of interdepartmental physician-scientists in translational biomedical research at Langone, and photographed them conversing “in an environmentally rich setting” that included “a representational object from the laboratory, the clinic, or the street.” These photos look rich, unstaged, and alive with the powerful personalities of scientific and medical research movers and shakers.

The authors say, “We wanted to illustrate that the School’s research scientists and physicians reach out to colleagues in their own field[s] and to those outside their fields of expertise.”

The report does much more than that:

• It is a model for health care writers reporting on the esoteric doings of medical researchers, a model of clarity, jargon-free writing, summarizing powers, use of statistics, storytelling on a wider scale, apt quotation, and many other qualities that are rare in reporting on research.
• One of the author-editors of the report writes, “We judge the [report] a success based on the upward movement of NYU Langone Medical Center on the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.”
• NYU Langone Medical Center research funding has risen more than 29 percent since 2009 in a recession economy, and “most of this increase was from the National Institutes of Health.” Is it mere coincidence that Langone first published this report in 2008?

The people responsible for this report are Marjorie Shaffer, editor, and Sherry Zucker, production coordinator. Congratulations.

The report is on view here.

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