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Last year a task force convened by Gov. Tim Walz delivered a number of recommendations to strengthen academic health at the University of Minnesota. The training of our state's health workforce, the research and the care delivered by the health sciences schools at the U are essential to the health of all Minnesotans.

Among the recommendations was a call for greater focus on creating the new care models of the future, not just to double down on the suboptimal status quo in health care delivery and public health. The task force also urged the U and Fairview to quickly resolve their partnership issues.

The university and Essentia recently proposed to join forces with Fairview to create a new system that would aim to simultaneously strengthen the U's academic health enterprise and shore up access to care statewide. I believe this proposal is quite responsive to the task force report and deserves serious attention.

There's a long way to go for the idea to come to fruition. The parties need to work through many details, and the attorney general and the Minnesota Department of Health will need to review any proposed organizational construct for its impact on health care costs, for instance. The potential benefits to the state are considerable.

Building on all the work done by Fairview and the U over many years, rather than tearing that system apart, saves considerable time and resources and does not disrupt the care of so many Minnesotans and the tripartite academic health mission on which the whole state depends. Adding Essentia into the mix brings a strong rural health resource into the partnership. The U can strengthen the unique collaborative potential between its highly ranked medical, nursing, public health, dental, pharmacy and veterinary schools with practice partners across the state. That's key to developing the new models of care and prevention we need to get better results for Minnesotans.

I've worked with the leaders of all three institutions during both good times and hard times for health care, and I greatly appreciate their commitment to our state. I wish them well in bringing a forward-looking vision to reality.

Jan Malcolm is a former commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Health and chair of the Governor's Task Force on Academic Health at the University of Minnesota.