Kaiser Permanente to Launch Medical School

The health system is looking to incorporate its integrated model for healthcare delivery into its training, saying current physician education hasn’t kept pace with complex care-delivery systems.

Not content with being one of the nation’s largest healthcare provider systems and a key innovator in the health IT space, Kaiser Permanente is taking its leadership role one step further by opening up a new medical school, officials announced yesterday.

Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente plans to open a medical school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times. Kaiser executives said they haven’t yet settled on a site for the school’s campus.

“There is a clear need for medical students today to have access to and learn how to properly use electronic health records well before they enter practice”, AMA Board Member Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, said in June.

Kaiser will face tough competition from more established and better known medical schools in the pursuit of top students and faculty nationwide.

“I’m as interested and motivated and part of the sponsorship of this 21st century new medical school if I were a physician myself”, Tyson said.

By schooling its own doctors, Kaiser would be able to eliminate that inefficiency, Braddock said.

Kaiser’s start-from-scratch approach might allow it to sidestep some of the cost and reimbursement issues facing academic medical centers and medical schools. Twenty new medical schools have opened in the US since 2002, he said, and many of them feature “innovative models”, he said. “We are all in it together on how to prepare physicians for the future”, Dr. Ellison said, according to the report.

The UCR medical school is in its third year of operation and the class entering the program in fall 2016 will increase from 50 students to 60, he said.

“Kaiser Permanente has been a catalyst for change in care delivery, and we will be a catalyst in medical education, through the opening of the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine”, added Dr. Edward M. Ellison, executive medical director of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group.

In a statement, Kaiser Permanente said it will create a legal entity to build and manage the new school and launch the accreditation process.