Mission
For more than a century, Weill Cornell Medicine has been committed to the art and science of medicine, through excellence in patient care, biomedical research and medical education. Our mission is to provide the highest quality of clinical care for the communities we serve, to conduct research at the cutting edge of knowledge and to provide the finest education possible for students pursuing medical degrees or advanced degrees in the biomedical sciences.
The organization’s newly unified identity as Weill Cornell Medicine continues to reinforce the connection to patients, who have consistently been the driving force behind the institution’s mission. Succinctly uniting its
three essential principles—to care, discover, and teach—the new name is the culmination of a strategic expansion that has positioned Weill Cornell Medicine to thrive in today’s evolving healthcare landscape and shape the future of medicine.
Care.
Weill Cornell Medicine is dedicated to delivering the highest quality health care and achieving the greatest outcomes possible for patients, who are at the center of everything we do. Long before the Medical College formalized a mission statement, the desire to improve patient care has driven the organization’s efforts.
Today, Weill Cornell Medicine is committed to providing each patient with the right treatment at exactly the right time, moving away from a one-size-fits-all mentality and toward a new era of tailored treatments for each individual. Weill Cornell Medicine’s Physician Organization has grown significantly to provide care that connects to its patients in the neighborhoods where they work and live, through medical practices in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Clinical care also continues to be the economic engine by which the institution is able to deliver upon its other principles of education and research.
Discover.
Excellence in patient care is realized through a robust biomedical research enterprise that can translate discoveries made in the lab into advanced clinical treatments. Weill Cornell Medicine has built an extensive research infrastructure, recruited esteemed new investigators, and secured substantial resources toward finding better treatments for medical diseases.
The organization’s vision for a 21st century research enterprise is built upon interdisciplinary communication and collaboration within the institution and with external clinical and academic partners. Weill Cornell Medicine is also committed to establishing relationships within the biopharmaceutical industry.
The interaction and collaboration between academia and private-sectors helps to advance research breakthroughs that have commercial potential to become viable treatments.
Teach.
From the start, the Medical College has placed a strong emphasis on clinical and scientific education. Under a new, patient-focused curriculum, current medical students are exposed to healthcare delivery from their first day of school, and continue to follow a panel of patients with chronic illnesses throughout all four years of their medical education. This approach helps students to understand healthcare delivery as well as the physical, social, and psychological effects of disease. They develop a powerful foundation for their medical practice, learning the value of treating patients holistically.
The Graduate School of Medical Sciences—part of a close partnership with the cancer-focused Sloan Kettering Institute and neighbor The Rockefeller University—is committed to providing advanced training in fields including microbiology, biophysics, and biochemistry. It leverages mutually beneficial partnerships with its neighboring institutions through programs that capitalized on each of their various strengths, such as the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and the Tri-Institutional MD-PhD program with The Rockefeller University.
Weill Cornell Medicine’s missions—to bring new medicines and therapies to patients as quickly and efficiently as possible, to understand how and why disease strikes, and to train the next generation of healthcare leaders—have become global in scale. Yet those core aspirations, to care, discover, and teach, have remained unchanged since the very beginning.