MU Health opens new multi-million dollar center

MU Health leaders said they hope a new medical center on the university’s campus will help address what the Association of American Medical Colleges is calling a “critical shortage” of doctors.

The AAMC commissions a study every year to look into what shortages the United States could face in health care. The 2017 indicates a projected shortage of between 40,800 and 104,900 doctors.

AAMC officials said that because the demand for health care will only increase, especially for those 65 years old and older, the number of doctors has to keep up. The shortage is also felt strongly in rural and underserved areas as well.

To help alleviate the shortage, the AAMC recommended expanding medical school class size, innovating in care delivery and team-based care, making better use of technology and increasing federal support for an additional 3,000 new residency positions per year over the next five years.

The University of Missouri partnered with CoxHealth and Mercy Springfield nearly a decade ago to find ways to address the shortage. MU students spend their first two years of medical school at the University of Missouri and then half of them spend years three and four in Springfield, at an extension clinic.

CoxHealth and Mercy are competing systems but came together for this project.

“They compete tooth and toenail but when it’s appropriate, they cooperate,” said Weldon Webb, the associate dean for the Springfield Clinical Campus and the driving force behind the new center project. “I worked with them for years on cooperative programs and they came together for this because they saw it as a way to produce more physicians from southwest Missouri and they wanted to be a part of that.”

The final piece is the new Patient-Centered Care Learning Center on MU’s campus that officially opened Monday, which university leaders said will have the space to expand class sizes from 96 to 128 students. According to some staff, conditions in the existing facilities were not keeping up with the increasing size of classes or with the technology needed to teach.

“I think that’s really cool that we’re increasing our class size to be able to have more students who are interested in medicine and hopefully primary care,” said second-year med student Megan Anderson.

Anderson said there are a number of ways the university helps encourage students to work in rural areas including a rural track program and telemedicine efforts. Telemedicine brings doctors digitally to patients who might be too far away or not have the ability to be physically present to receive care.

“We recruit students from rural communities and put them back in rural communities to do that learning,” said Webb. “We retain about 66 percent of those graduates in rural communities in Missouri so it works. We know how to do it.”

The $42 million project was paid for with $12 million in state funding and the reset in revenue bonds the University of Missouri will repay.

The construction and architect teams are both national companies that are headquartered in Missouri.