It's the third campus for OU's Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine now has another new facility in Cleveland, almost a year after opening a new campus in Dublin.
The $20.2 million project, located at Cleveland Clinic South Pointe Hospital, gives students the opportunity to work with doctors from the Cleveland Clinic in facilities that mirror the medical center’s.
“Our facility is actually located within a building that is part of an operating hospital system,” OU-HCOM Executive Dean Kenneth Johnson said in an email. “There are some naturally shared common areas and spaces that intersect by design, so our students, from their first day of medical school will literally be surrounded by and interact with patients and healthcare professionals as they go to and from class.”
Students can connect with students and professors at other campuses through classroom televisions that offer telecommunication services.
The facility also includes multiple labs, offices and a practice operating room.
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“OU really put in a lot of effort to make it as nice and high tech as possible, given that we have a lot of distance learning between Athens, Dublin and Cleveland,” said Andrew Goldblum, a first-year medical student. “In combination with OU and the Cleveland Clinic, they really made it top-of-the-line for us to learn and train.”
In addition to the new facilities, OU-HCOM Cleveland Dean Isaac Kirstein said having access to the Cleveland Clinic is the greatest advantage of the new location.
“They really understand keeping people healthy, not only the sickest of the sick,” he said. “They had the realization that we need to have a community-based primary approach. To be able to keep populations healthy, you need to have talented primary care physicians. That's what we bring to the Cleveland Clinic. Students get access to passionate instructors who are on the leading edge of health care.”
Johnson said in an email that both the Cleveland Clinic and OU-HCOM can benefit from the partnership. Students have the access to “knowledge and expertise that’s available from the Cleveland area medical community” and the Clinic can make an “investment in primary care.”
To assist in training more primary care physicians, OU-HCOM and the Cleveland Clinic are working to start a new curriculum, Kirstein said.
“We want to provide a longitudinal education experience rather than different systems that are completely disjointed,” Kirstein said. “We want to design a school curriculum and residency curriculum that mesh together.”
Fifty-one students are attending the college’s Cleveland branch, and 36 of those students are from Northeast Ohio, Johnson said.
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“(The Cleveland Clinic is) world renowned in the medical field and patient care,” Goldblum said. “Once we start getting into rotations and everything, you want to see as much as you can, ranging from the relatively simple stuff to the some of the more complex stuff, and they can handle the most complex diseases, and that is only going to benefit our knowledge base compared to some of the other schools across the country who may not have access to such a large hospital with so many campuses.”
Luke Furman contributed to this report.
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