A Cleveland campus will provide new and improved resources for pre-med students
After spending nearly $25 million for a medical presence in Central Ohio, Ohio University is budgeting another $36 million for a campus near Cleveland.
Officials at OU’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine (OU-HCOM) said the costs are necessary to meet the college’s goal of increasing primary care physicians across Ohio.
The college’s northeastern Ohio campus — in Warrensville Heights — will partner with the Cleveland Clinic, which will contribute about $13.1 million toward renovating an old hospital to educate new doctors.
“(The Cleveland Clinic is) a recognized global leader in healthcare,” said Dr. Isaac Kirstein, dean of the new campus. “They realize the need to innovate primary care, and they are trying to transform how they practice and how they prepare students.”
Before the college finished expanding to Dublin in Central Ohio this summer, the college received its accreditation in May for a campus in Cleveland focused on primary care.
This is an important focus for both the school and the hospital because the U.S. is facing a national shortage of more than 45,000 primary physicians, said Dr. Robert Juhasz, president of the Cleveland Clinic’s South Pointe Hospital.
OU-HCOM is number one in Ohio for producing primary care physicians, with 60 percent of students pursuing the specialty, said Dr. Kenneth Johnson, the college’s executive dean.
“We are using the money to renovate facilities totaling 54,000 square feet in Warrensville Heights, where most of the first- and second-year curriculum will take place,” Kirstein said. “We will have new anatomy labs, pod-style learning and state-of-the-art clinical space.”
The cost to build each school is relatively comparable between all three locations, with building, renovation and faculty employment costs, Johnson said.
The northeastern Ohio campus is expected to have an economic impact of $19 million annually, and it will also generate 100 new jobs, Juhasz said.
Officials plan on having 50 students in the Cleveland campus’ inaugural class, officials said.
Due to accreditation standards, each class at the Cleveland campus can only have 60 students, at most, Johnson said.
By next year, the college overall is expected to have a total of 610 students, he added.
Around 25 percent of applicants to OU-HCOM are from the Cleveland area, Juhasz said.
The college has had students work at the Cleveland Clinic in the past, but the new partnership brings the clinic directly into OU’s curriculum, Johnson said.
All three campuses of the college in Athens, Dublin and Warrensville Heights will initially have the same curriculum, with different facilities and opportunities through on-campus partnerships, Kirstein said.
“The Cleveland campus gives students the opportunity to work with the underserved in the inner city, where the Athens campus works more with the rural and Appalachian region, making them very different entities,” Johnson said. “The importance is that we are leaving our footprint state-wide.”
The tentative first day for students on the Cleveland campus is July 6, 2015.
“In one of the presidential debates a couple years ago, President Obama mentioned the Cleveland Clinic three times,” Johnson said. “Their partnership can only lift us up.”
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