Matt Meyer today announced a partnership with Thomas Jefferson University to establish a regional campus of Sidney Kimmel Medical College, creating the first four-year medical school in Delaware’s history and a major investment in the future of healthcare access across the state.
Delaware is currently one of only three states in the nation without a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.) granting institution. The Delaware Medical School Consortium will change that, providing students with the opportunity to complete their entire medical education in Delaware while creating a stronger pipeline of physicians to serve communities throughout the state.
This just leaves Alaska and Maine as the only states without an in-state medical school.
It is a lot of new schools. DO schools were already opening more and more schools, but the MD schools–that’s a new thing.
There’s a big push on within the LCME and AOA to accredit new med schools to help cushion an expect shortfall of 86,000 physician in the workforce in 2036. Many of new med schools are in areas that are medically underserved with the hope that students who come from that area will remain in the same area for residency and professional practice.
The LCME started accrediting 1-2 new school/year and enlarged class sizes by 15-25% around the mid-2000s to help alleviate a projected physician shortage in 2025. But the 4 new schools/year PLUS the accrediting of additional campuses is recent–the last 2-3 years.
One reason has been a paradigm shift that sees more medical schools being sponsored not just by academic centers, but by healthcare systems. (Mayo Clinic was the first in 1972, but until Kaiser Permanente in 2020, there just weren’t many established that way.)
Vertical integration, apparently, is seen as a good business model.
None are closing, although one of the newest MD schools is in some financial difficulty and could be in danger of closing unless it gets additional resources to shore up its bottom line. The school has had some significant understaffing, an unusually high staff and faculty turnover, and carries debt load that’s twice that of all other med schools.