Building an Academic Center for Integrative Health: Lessons Learned From the UC San Diego Experience

Despite the steady growth of complementary and integrative health programs within academic health centers there is still a need for practical descriptions of how successful programs are developed, integrated, and sustained. We present an organic history of the UC San Diego Centers for Integrative Health over the past 19 years. Starting with the original ignition spark in 2007, we describe the steps we took to gain approval from leadership, receive input from the UCSD community, and build the services, infrastructure and team necessary to launch our initial effort, the Center for Integrative Medicine (CIM) in 2011. We then describe our progress over the next several years and the evolution of the CIM into the UC San Diego Centers for Integrative Health (UCSD-CIH) in 2018. Key areas of progress over the last 7 years are described with further details summarized in table format. We then detail the lessons we learned and specific principles we developed that guided our efforts. We think that these insights may be useful to others who want to pursue similar efforts within their academic health centers.