The biggest award given to an Ohio college is being used in large part to fund new extension campuses for its medical school throughout the state.
Almost 30 percent of a $105 million grant that OU’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine received from the Osteopathic Heritage Foundations will go toward the development of its Dublin campus.
OU-HCOM received the grant in 2011.
“The Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine has had a long and valued relationship with the Osteopathic Heritage Foundations,” said Kathy Brooks, executive director of strategic initiatives for OU-HCOM.
The $28,920,225 sum will be distributed over 20 years to establish and develop the campus in conjunction with the Mount Carmel Health System and OhioHealth.
The Heritage Foundation awarded $6,685,451 so far to OU-HCOM, which has been used to purchase and renovate three buildings in Dublin.
Dublin startup costs, such as hiring faculty and purchasing distance learning equipment, were also paid in part by the grant, said William Burke, dean of OU-HCOM’s Dublin campus.
OU-HCOM has had to foot a portion of the bill, though. The college has put about $1.5 million from its own reserves to startup costs. OU-HCOM doesn’t expect it will have to fundraise to subsidize branch costs, Burke said.
“You really can start to see what this is going to look like in the very near future,” Burke said.
The grant is also currently funding the temporary setup for Dublin staff—a rental office in Dublin and Burke’s travel costs as he commutes from Dublin to Athens every week.
Once the campus opens to 50 medical students in July 2014, the agreement between OU-HCOM and the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation requires that the campus have a self-sustaining budget by the end of the 2015-16 academic year.
The Osteopathic Heritage Foundation worked with OU-HCOM before signing the grant over to detail every step OU-HCOM will follow in establishing the extension campus, said Richard Vincent, president and CEO of the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation.
“There is a little flexibility with regard to how certain funds are used, but (the grant) is pretty prescriptive,” Vincent said.
OU-HCOM and the foundation have had a 35-year relationship in which the two have worked together to improve primary care throughout the state, Vincent said.
At the beginning of that relationship, the foundation owned and operated Doctors Hospital in Columbus, but eventually it sold that entity to OhioHealth, providing funds—supplemented by donations—for the organization to donate to entities that encourage primary care.
“When we looked at what we thought the university could do and its history of producing high-quality primary care physicians, there was only one decision there was to make, which was help the (college),” Vincent said.
Before receiving the grant, OU-HCOM was called OU’s College of Medicine, but the Board of Trustees took the suggestion of OU-HCOM’s administrators and changed the name in 2011 to reflect the college’s partnership with the Heritage Osteopathic Foundation, Brooks said.
“The naming of the Heritage College demonstrates the close alignment and the long-standing partnership of shared missions and shared values,” Brooks said in an email.
In addition to providing for a majority of the development of OU-HCOM’s Dublin campus, the grant will go to eight other goals in order to advance primary care in the state of Ohio.
Those goals include providing student scholarships, developing a diabetes and endocrine care and research center, and increasing free and low-cost health programs for the surrounding area through Community Health Programs.
OU-HCOM is also opening a Cleveland campus, but it won’t receive grant money.
“All of that stuff is only meaningful if at the end of the day, the citizens of Ohio are provided better care,” Vincent said.
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This article appeared in print under the headline "Dublin extension receives healthy slice of HCOM grant"
