In late April, the Osteopathic Heritage Foundations broke records with its multi-million-dollar gift to the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, but the Foundations’ relationship with the university spans decades.
“The history really goes back with us and the medical school into the ’70s,” said Richard Vincent, president and CEO of the Foundations. The Foundations began using OU-COM graduates in Columbus and Nelsonville hospitals, he added.
This longstanding relationship, along with the current shortage of primary care physicians in metropolitan and Appalachian areas of Ohio, played a significant role in the Foundations’ decision to continue investing in OU-COM, Vincent said.
Since the 1970s, the organization has given other multi-million-dollar gifts to fund academic research centers and clinical simulation laboratories at OU, said Jack Brose, dean of the medical college.
In addition to past gifts, the recently awarded $105 million will fund the Vision 2020 plan, which ultimately aims to improve clinical care in Ohio.
Three main goals of the vision include redesigning the college’s primary-care curriculum, providing scholarships that encourage medical students to pursue careers in primary care and extending the college via a Columbus campus, Brose said.
“One of our college’s missions is to supply care to under-served communities in Southeastern Ohio and urban communities,” Brose said. “That was a major part of the thinking as we were putting this plan together.”
The vision plan would be executed in steps.
The intent is to open the Columbus campus by 2014, the diabetes center in 2016 and the new neurological musculoskeletal center by 2018, Brose said.
“This wasn’t a sudden thing,” he said. “I’ve been working with the Heritage Foundations very closely for a year and a half. … When it really became official was when they had their board meeting in February sometime, and they notified me that, if we could get everything worked out, they would be willing to help us out.”
The college currently has about 1,620 graduates practicing medicine in Ohio, said Jill Harman, director of alumni affairs for OU-COM, adding that 56 percent of those who stayed in the state practice in the primary-care fields of family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics.
The plan intends to increase the number of medical students by 50 in 2014 with the Columbus campus and to enhance the curriculum, Brose said.
The plan also includes a new diabetes research facility and a new home for enhanced musculoskeletal and neurological research — both in Athens.
With the increased number of students and facilities, the plan also uses scholarship money to persuade medical students to take on primary-care medicine, Vincent said.
The latest push to improve on the number of primary-care physicians in Ohio began about two years ago, he said.
“I encouraged (Dean) Brose to develop a long-term plan,” Vincent said. “He took that and put together a large group of faculty, medical students and stakeholders and, over the ensuing months, developed Vision 2020.”
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