Concordia University Wisconsin, Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine partner on medical education
Photo caption: Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine students in front of Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital – Milwaukee Campus. Courtesy of the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine’s proposed satellite campus at Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon could start welcoming between 75 to 100 medical students a year starting in the early 2030s.
“It really expands opportunities for students who are interested in this kind of education to be in the Milwaukee area and to be in Wisconsin and to serve the needs of this state and region,” said Erik Ankerberg, Concordia University Wisconsin president.
Ankerberg sees the project as complementary to the state’s two current medical schools. The Medical College of Wisconsin and University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health previously opposed state funding for a different effort to establish a Wisconsin osteopathic college.
“We hope it is not so much competition, but adding to our sector’s ability to contribute significantly to the healthcare needs of the state,” Ankerberg said.
Tracy Farnsworth, president of the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine, said they do not anticipate seeking state funding for the project.
Farnsworth and Ankerberg spoke to Wisconsin Health News separately this week. Their responses to questions, lightly edited for conciseness and clarity, are below.
WHN: How did this partnership come about?
Farnsworth: About three years ago, our friends at Concordia University Wisconsin, which has a really fine health sciences campus in the Milwaukee area, reached out to some of our colleagues on our board of trustees, specifically to (former Aurora Health Care CEO) Dr. Nick Turkal, a prominent physician and physician leader in that region, and said, ‘Look, we’d love to find a way to establish a college of medicine here in our community. Can you help us?’
Typically, to stand up a new college of medicine, either allopathic or osteopathic, either M.D. or D.O., you either do it de novo — build it from scratch — or you partner and collaborate with existing schools of medicine, which is the much easier, more cost effective and more practical way to go.
We had a lot of conversations over a long period of time and finally decided, ‘Let’s get more serious about this and see what it will take to make that happen.’
WHN: An articulation agreement will facilitate Concordia students’ enrollment into the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine. What will that entail?
Ankerberg: One of the strengths is having, eventually, the intention to have a partner campus from ICOM on our campus, and the possibility that students could come to Concordia and have this seamless pathway to the ICOM campus here. Many of our students, of course, come from Wisconsin or within 200 miles of our campus. I think one of the intentions is: Can we contribute to addressing shortages here in Wisconsin for all kinds of medical professionals, but doctors in particular?
There has been some conversation about: Could we create, eventually, an expedited pathway with ICOM that is a seven-year program instead of eight years? We don’t have that formalized yet. But, conceptually, are there shortcuts or ways to make the pathway to degree completion shorter? There are also great possibilities for collaboration, where students could be dual enrolled. For example, a D.O. student could also be in our MBA program or our master’s of public health program.
WHN: What will this campus look like?
Ankerberg: This is contingent on the accreditation being pursued by ICOM, so we are speaking in some hypotheticals here. But one of those synergies that we found is that we have a lot of the lab space and classroom space. We already have facilities in place that have some ability to accommodate their students, like an anatomy and physiology lab, a cadaver lab and large classrooms with great technology in our pharmacy building. There is some capacity here, just from some more practical aspects of a healthcare campus, to support them. That was the starting point of our determining, ‘Boy, there’s possibility here.’
They will likely need to build out some space. But that would all be to be determined right now. There’s enough capacity here for them to start their work.
WHN: Where does the accreditation process stand for establishing a campus?
Farnsworth: This college was established 10 years ago. We became fully accredited four years ago. In the last year and a half, we implemented what we call a class size increase. We grew this home campus from 150 to 220 students per cohort. Students come to us from all over the country.
Whenever you initiate a so-called substantive change like growing your class size, you have to wait a number of years before you can go back to the accrediting body and ask for another substantive change, which a satellite campus in Wisconsin would be. Where things currently stand is the accrediting body, which is the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, said, ‘Look, please don’t come back and make an application for a new location until 2029 and then stand up the new campus three years later, which is in 2032.’ So it’s several years out. There is a chance and a hope — I certainly hope — that we might be able to trim a year or so off of those timelines, for a combination of reasons. We’ll see if that happens.
Meanwhile, there’s so much work that needs to be done to design and renovate facilities and continue to build our clinical partners in that region. For example, we already send a good number of students to do clinical rotations in their third and fourth years at Ascension, with their partner hospitals there in the area. We would like to establish partnerships and relationships with Aurora Health Care and others in that region.
There’s a lot of work that has already been done and will yet be done over the next two, three or four-plus years before all this comes into play. Medical schools are very complicated enterprises, and they’re fairly significant economic and social impact enterprises. It’s important that we do it right and we do it well.
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