Partners HealthCare: Pooling Resources for Wider Community Reach

Partners HealthCare is a collaboration of healthcare institutions and professionals established to serve the local and global communities through patient care, teaching and research. Founded as a not-for-profit company in 1994, Partners is the result of the initial collaboration of its founding members, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In order to carry out its community services, Partners has put up specialty and community hospitals, health centers and home care, established a physician network, and managed care organizations. Its teaching affiliate is the Harvard Medical School.

With close to 60,000 professionals and employees, Partners is Massachusetts’ largest private employer. It works on an annual budget of $1.4 billion, majority of which is spent on research. It founding members are still the largest recipients of the National Institutes of Health funding among private hospitals in the US.

Partners’ medical education programs are among the most competitive in the US. Partners offers over 200 residency and fellowship programs. Its training programs for physicians regularly rotate among the academic medical centers and the specialty and community hospitals.