Quinnipiac’s medical school is only a week old, but its mission already is expanding.
While the new $100 million school will put an emphasis on training primary care physicians, it will also focus on global public health issues and potentially open a rehabilitation institute for military veterans, officials say.
“It’s in the idea stage right now, but we are considering it,” said Dr. Bruce Koeppen, founding dean of the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine and vice president for health affairs.
Quinnipiac’s inaugural class of 60 students had its first day of school Aug. 19, a milestone day for a program that’s been in the works since 2010.
Koeppen, who spent 28 years in academic medicine at UConn before taking the top position at the Q’s new med school, had an opportunity few people get: build a program from the ground up.
Koeppen admits the task wasn’t easy. His biggest challenge, he says, was working two jobs at once. In addition to building a medical school and its curriculum, there was also a grueling accreditation process that took considerable manpower to sift through.
It all paid off last fall when the school received preliminary accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, and approval from the state Board of Education. That set the stage for Quinnipiac’s 2013 opening.
During the last three years building the program, Koeppen says the school didn’t experience any major setbacks. They even stayed on budget for build out of the med school’s $70 million facilities, located in the Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences on Quinnipiac’s North Haven Campus, alongside the schools of nursing and health sciences.
The three schools are united not only in the same state-of-the-art complex but by the same mission: to graduate medical and health care practitioners who will push for a collaborative, economical, and efficient health care system, Koeppen says.
“It’s been amazing to me the excitement across the state for this new medical school,” Koeppen said. “To be able to start from scratch where you don’t have traditional silos, it really gives you degrees of freedom you wouldn’t have in a traditional medical school.”
Another challenge the school faced was recruiting faculty and students. Like any new startup, getting people to buy into the program wasn’t easy. To spread word of its mission and vision, Koeppen said the school implemented an aggressive marketing campaign that included taking out ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and in college newspapers at Michigan, UCLA, and John Hopkins University.
The strategy paid off, Koeppen said. They received applications from 1,000 prospective faculty members and 2,000 students.
They ended up hiring 22 full-time faculty, many of whom left positions at other institutions, including Yale, Harvard, and UConn. New recruits include J. Nathan Davis, an associate professor of medical sciences, who recently moved to Connecticut after spending 16 years teaching at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Medical School.
Davis said he was wooed by Quinnipiac because of its emphasis on teaching and faculty development. During the interview process, he says he was required to give a lecture, something rarely done during the vetting process at other medical schools.
“When I talked to people I got the sense the environment here was going to be very different and attractive,” said Davis, who was hired as a chemistry content expert. “There is a very clear emphasis on teaching and rewarding teaching.”
Besides full-time staff, Quinnipiac has 298 clinical faculty at affiliated hospitals including its principal partner St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport. Other affiliates include MidState Medical Center, Middlesex Hospital, Hartford Hospital, and Waterbury Hospital.
Meanwhile, 22-year old Windsor native Sarah Mahmood, a recent UConn graduate, is one of the 2,000 students that applied to get into the Q’s inaugural class.
When she got her acceptance letter earlier this year, Mahmood said she signed on because of the prospects of getting individualized attention from faculty.
“It’s always nerve racking to pick something new,” Mahmood said, “but it also presents a lot of opportunity. Staff will provide individualized attention because they don’t have 500 students to deal with. That should help with residency placement.”
Mahmood said she doesn’t know yet what type of medicine she will practice, but Quinnipiac’s goal is for 50 percent of graduates to go into primary care, a professionprojected to experience a shortage in coming years, but also play a larger role in health care under the Affordable Care Act, said Dean Koeppen.
With the addition of a medical school, Quinnipiac will be educating the triad responsible for primary care — the physician assistant, nurse practitioner and physician.
“We tried to identify students on the front end who would be interested in primary care,” Koeppen said. “But students change their mind. It’s going to take a few years before we find out. The first graduates won’t be done until 2017 and won’t practice until 2020.”
