A central Minnesota banker is teaming up with a New York academic to offer a novel solution to Minnesota's looming doctor shortage: a for-profit osteopathic medical college housed in a converted public school in Gaylord.
The pair visited Minnesota politicians and hospital and clinic executives last week to see if they would host the school's students for on-the-job training that would be a requirement for their degrees.
Partnering with a new medical school would be attractive to hospitals and clinics that need to replace retiring doctors and tend to an aging patient population, said Philip Keithahn, chief executive of ProGrowth Bank in Gaylord and the chief financial officer for the proposed college. "They have a huge vested interest in something like this working," he said.
Keithahn and his partner have secured more than half of their start-up funding and won preliminary approval from the Gaylord City Council to convert a soon-to-be-vacated elementary and junior high school complex.
The Minnesota College of Osteopathic Medicine still faces big questions before it opens in fall 2018 — including whether it can recruit sufficient faculty to a town 50 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, where the students would complete their clinical training and how it will overcome what is already a shortage of postgraduate residency openings at local hospitals.
The school nonetheless presents a bold solution to Minnesota's shortage of primary care physicians, which is expected to worsen even with young doctors emerging from the state's three medical schools — University of Minnesota campuses in Minneapolis and Duluth and the Mayo Clinic's school in Rochester. A wave of retirements is expected to leave rural Minnesota 800 doctors short at a time when the aging population will have more medical needs.
"The doctor shortage is a real problem … and it's going to be a huge problem in the next 10 years in primary care," said Dr. Joseph Willett, an osteopathic physician in Marshall who is evaluating the proposal on behalf of the Minnesota Osteopathic Medical Society.
Renovation of Gaylord's Sibley Public Schools complex would create a high-tech campus for up to 150 students per graduating class, and would include student housing, said Jay Sexter, the chief executive of the new college.