Early in May the University of Texas System Board of Regents voted to approve the establishment of a medical school on the UT Austin campus. It’s expected to be at least another decade before the school is built, but in the meantime a question is still raised: How will a medical school affect life on campus and Austin at large?

Economics

The medical school is projected to cost $65 million annually. The amount is reoccurring, staying the same as the school transitions from construction phases to teaching medical students, according to UT Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer Kevin Hegarty.

However, when the Board of Regents voted to fund the medical school, they only agreed to foot $30 million for the first eight years and $25 million for the following years. The University is counting on the City of Austin and funds from the Seton Medical Center and St. David’s Hospital to cover the other half of the budget, a plan that’s likely to be finalized later this year, said Hegarty.

If approved by the Seton Board of Trustees, a $250 million donation from the Seton will go toward building a new teaching hospital to replace University Medical Center Brackenridge with a new teaching hospital.

All of the money that UT is putting toward the medical school comes from the Permanent University Fund, a state held collection of cash from oil lands and other assets used to fund works specifically at UT as well as Texas A&M University. That means no budget cuts to any existing university programs and no tuition hikes for the purpose of funding the medical school, said Hegarty.

“It makes no sense to try to develop a premier medical school while at the same time you would be potentially starving the main campus,” Hegarty said. “Because the two are so interlinked they both have to be healthy.

Once doors open, the medical school is expected to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the university in research funds alone, said Hegarty.

“In the very mature institutions, the medical research institutions end up attracting research dollars that dwarf the rest of the institutions,” Hegarty said.

The precedent looks good: over the past two years UT has received $1.1 billion in research funds alone.

Along with bringing in raw dollars, the medical school is expected to create hundreds of high-skilled jobs. If the medical school has employment numbers anything like the neighboring University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (which has a dental, health professions and nursing school along with a medical school) it could be a literal boom—health care and biosciences is the largest sector of the San Antonio economy, generating the city $24.5 billion per year.

Campus

The university already has six UT branded health institutions around Texas. None of them, however, are integrated into a larger academic campus, while it’s key part in the establishment of the UT Austin medical school.

“We did not want to just establish another branch of an existing institution,” Hegarty said. “We wanted something that was tightly, tightly integrated with the University of Texas at Austin campus.”

The importance of an on-campus site for the medical school comes down to ease of collaboration between the colleges, said Hegarty - something that’s expected to unfold naturally between the medical school UT’s established schools of nursing and public health, as well as the department of biomedical engineering. But Hegarty also envisions the other colleges acting as an asset for medical students, teaching them skills that simply aren’t available at any other of the UT medical branches.

“You have these cross-collaborations that happen between business and law and business and engineering, same thing happens in the sciences,” Hegarty said.

The importance of collaboration is planned to extend into the medical school’s classrooms and clinical rounds at hospitals by having medical students and other health care professional students work together long before they meet on the job.

“We call it Inter-professional education, so that medical students learn in collaboration with nursing students, pharmacy students, public health students and so forth,” Dr. Kenneth Shine, The Executive Vice Chancellor for UT Health Affairs, said. “Healthcare in the 21st century is team care.”

The medical school may be on campus but it’s likely that medical students will be spending much of their time at the teaching hospital that will also be established. But unlike traditional medical schooling, were patient interaction is usually left for the third and fourth years of school, UT wants to start patient interaction at earlier stages, said Shine.

Delivering Care

The university is working closely with St. David’s and Seton hospital to provide places for students and faculty to do clinical work. A more unexpected partner in care coverage is Texas A&M University.

The former UT football rival opened a health center, complete with medical, nursing and pharmacy schools, in Round Rock in 2009 that emphasizes training general practice physicians and has less of a focus on research, said Hegarty. The UT school, on the other hand, is envisioned being more specialist inclined and a research powerhouse.

Dr. Philip Huang, the Austin Health and Human Services medical director, describes the increase in healthcare professionals in the area as a potential catalyst for a chain reaction of other beneficial effects, including not having to travel out of the city to receive state-of-the-art care.

“Increasing the health care resources and man power in the community is one of the biggest benefits,” Huang said. “Whether it’s in internal man power and also in brain power and even in resources, it's bringing dollars to the community.”

Why now?

The predictions of Hegarty, Shine and Huang inspire another question: Why has it taken a university that existed before the discovery of antibiotics this long to establish a medical school?

“The lack of unified vision,” Hegarty said, saying how both UT and Seton had wanted a medical school for many years but were unsure how to go about it. “There wasn’t any catalyst to get us all together on the same page and get our resources together to figure the problem out—That’s where Senator Watson and his leadership really brought us all together.”

Senator Kirk Watson, a former Austin mayor, has building a medical school at the very top of his ’10 Goals in 10 Years’ plan, a list of projects and polices that Watson’s website says is meant to “help all of us live longer, better and more prosperously by investing in our community’s health.” Watson himself could not be reached for comment.

It will be years before anyone can point out a physical medical school on campus, but Hegarty says that it will be a resource that’s worth the wait.

“The University of Texas at Austin and our partners in this are excited and deeply committed to bringing all of this, medical school, medical research facilities and the teaching hospital to central Texas because it’s good for everybody,” Hegarty said.