Tuesday, October 07, 2014ROOTSTOWN, Ohio -- From a concept 40 years ago to breaking ground in farmland and becoming a medical university that has graduated 3,000 primary care physicians, half of them practicing in Ohio, how Northeast Ohio Medical University grew, and the stature it’s achieved, is a story its president, Dr. Jay A. Gershen, summarizes in three talking points: collaborations, business principles and focus.
Gershen begins by noting NEOMED’s academic focus within its three colleges -- medicine, pharmacy and graduate studies. “We’re not all things to all people,” he says. “We’re training physicians, pharmacists, public health professionals with doctorates and master’s degree, and scientists -- and we have four areas of research, not 100.”
The school operates on a $60 million annual budget, $17 million of which comes from research grants. Of the total budget, the proportion of state tax dollars has fallen from 70% five years ago to the “40% to 50% range today,” the university president says.
Gershen points to the business principles that funded the NEOMED Education and Wellness (NEW) Center, a 177,000-square-foot structure that fronts the university campus off state Route 44 in Rootstown. The building was constructed by Signet Enterprises of Akron and “built in 18 months without one penny of taxpayer money. This is a public/private partnership,” he explains. Bonds that funded construction “are being paid by the revenue that comes in from tenants and the community, and we do that through a mixed-use project.”
The NEW Center, open to the community, houses medical offices and a fitness center operated by Sequoia Wellness, a private company in partnership with Signet and Akron General Health Systems, and a conference and event center that can seat 500.
Beginning early next year, Akron-based Summa Health System will lease a portion of the first floor, offering onsite primary health care through an expanded partnership announced Sept. 29 when the building was dedicated (READ STORY).
Collaborations, Gershen’s third talking point, have been standard practice since the medical college was created in 1973, he says.
Limited state resources – and political opposition in the aftermath of the costly opening of a medical college and affiliated hospital at The University of Toledo – led to a compromise ingeniously instigated by then state Sen. Harry Meshel of Youngstown.
Meshel tells it this way, quoting one of his college professors: “If you look for change of any kind, you will encounter opposition and you just have to roll over them.”
And so he did, rallying the Mahoning Valley to the idea of YSU building its own medical school, then introducing legislation authorizing separate medical schools at Youngstown State University, the University of Akron and Kent State University.
“Everybody knew three medical colleges so close together was impossible and I said, ‘Good. The impossible tells you to look at what is possible,’ ” Meshel remembers.
His political ploy worked.
Legislators and state officials agreed that state tax dollars would fund a joint medical school – the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM). As for where the campus would be built, it was decided that farmland in Rootstown provided a midpoint off U.S. Route 77 that would serve all three universities, and the region’s hospitals would collaborate to provide medical internships.
The charter class of 42 primary care physicians was graduated in 1981, among them Dr. Dianne M. Bitonte Miladore of Youngstown, a member of NEOMED board of trustees since 2008.
“I don’t think any of us knew 40 years ago what this campus would become,” she says. “My class size was 42 students. There was no campus housing and if we wanted to eat lunch, we went over to Rootstown High School.”
Today there are plenty of places to eat lunch for the 850 students who are obtaining advanced health degrees. Thirteen buildings sits on the campus, including The Village at NEOMED, another partnership with Signet Enterprises, which built and manages student housing that opened last year.
In 2011, to reflect the addition of the College of Pharmacy in 2006 and the College of Graduate Studies in 2010, the school was renamed Northeast Ohio Medical University.
Today NEOMED is the only medical university in the United States that’s affiliated with six universities –Youngstown, Akron, Kent, Cleveland State, Miami and Central State – as well as Hiram College. Twenty-four hospital partners, including St. Elizabeth Health Center and Northside Medical Center in Youngstown, provide teaching resources that aggregate to 7,000 patient beds, and 2,200 members of the school’s hospital-affiliated clinical faculty hold staff appointments.
“We have an additional 35 or 40 clinical networks, pharmacy chains, health clinics where our students do their practicing as they become physicians and pharmacists,” Gershen says.
“We’ve also added an entrepreneurial venture called the REDIZone [Research, Entrepreneurship, Discovery and Innovation].” The office space and wet laboratories are intended to support 10 biotech companies in the commercialization of their products. “These companies will pay market value to lease their space, but they have access to all of our animal facilities, our centralized research facilities, and most importantly, our faculty,” Gershen says.
Still, NEOMED’s priority is educating health professionals, physicians and pharmacists to serve all of northeastern Ohio – including its inner cities where health outcomes are poor. (See story Page 42.)
“The national numbers show we’ll be short by about 40,000 primary care physicians in 2025,” Gershen says. “One of our missions is to put more family physicians out there, more pediatricians and so forth. We’re trying to balance the workforce in such a way that we’re not only dealing with the numbers but we’re also dealing with the distribution and diversity.”
In Ohio, state statistics show an average ratio of one primary care physician for 1,332 residents.
In Mahoning County, where 257 NEOMED alumni live and work, according to the university, the ratio is 1,125-to-1. The ratio in Trumbull County is 1,885-to-1, in Columbiana County 1,763-to-1.
Says Dr. Chander M. Kohli, president of the university’s board of trustees, “It’s not easy to attract a physician to any particular area unless there is some kind of family or financial connection. But we are training people from our area, and they are probably going to stay and serve the community better than if we tried to recruit them from the outside.”
Kohli is a practicing neurosurgeon in Youngstown. “I’ve been involved with the university from the time it was developed and seen it grow from a child to a full adult,” he says. “What we have accomplished is because of great leadership.”
Gershen, a pediatric dentist with a doctorate in education, fully credits his predecessors for the university’s growth.
Since arriving at the Rootstown campus in 2010, he has presided over the school’s $177 million campus expansion – the NEW Center, The Village at NEOMED and the Research and Graduation Building that opened in August 2013.
Still to come are community enhancements that center on building a retail and commercial complex open to the public.
“We want people to feel welcome to come in, to break down the barriers of the ivory tower and make sure that people know this university belongs to them,” Gershen says.
“This is an economic engine,” he emphasizes, quoting studies that find each physician on average generates about $1 million a year in economic activity. “If you multiply that by 1,500 or so physicians who are practicing in Ohio, that’s $1.5 billion in economic activity. Not only are we creating a healthy environment and access to care, but as we retain students in northeast Ohio, we’re developing communities and economic prosperity.”
Editor's Note: The October edition of The Business Journal features extensive coverage of NEOMED and its growth over 40 years. Be sure to watch Tuesday's DailyBUZZ for the first in a series of video reports.
Pictured: Chander A. Kohli chairs the board of trustees. Jay A. Gershen is NEOMED’s president.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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