Tad Walch covers religion with a focus on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
BYU may be starting a medical school to train new physicians in the midst of an accelerating national doctor shortage, but there is no scarcity in the number of enthusiastic doctors ready to join the faculty or help the school get off the ground.
The school, announced in July, now has three employees, but that number masks an immense amount of work that is under way.
BYU President Shane Reese and the founding dean of the School of Medicine, Dr. Mark Ott, have hired national consultants, assembled a BYU School of Medicine Advisory Council and created 15 working groups with 140 advisers.
They also have established a strong foundation for a crucial collaboration with Intermountain Health, which already has invested heavily in the success of the new school by loaning two executives to BYU on a full-time basis during the buildout phase.
Reese and Ott say they have been swamped with support since the launch of the school was announced by the chairman and vice chairmen of the BYU Board of Trustees. They also serve as the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU -- President Russell M. Nelson, who was a pioneering heart surgeon, and his counselors, President Dallin H. Oaks and President Henry B. Eyring.
"I have spoken or texted or emailed with over 1,000 people since I was named dean," Ott told the Deseret News. He has consulted with many of them and added dozens to working groups focused on issues from curriculum and accreditation to faculty and information technology.
Most of those people are donating their time to the school to help it get out of the starting blocks -- "a gigantic undertaking," in Ott's words -- while planning to keep the jobs they have. "It's hundreds and hundreds of people that just keep offering to help," Ott said. "These are incredibly talented people from all over the country who are just excited about this."
"Hiring at BYU is not like hiring in any other place, and we all understand that," said Dr. Ott, who has had multiple candidates for both a senior associate dean of academics and an assistant dean of finance and administration, which are at different phases of the hiring process.
"We will never have a problem filling a position, that much I can tell you," he said. "We've even had people who aren't members of our faith who have applied for these positions, and I've had wonderful conversations with them as well about what it means to work at BYU. So there are people both in the church and outside the church who would be very excited to be at BYU."
Ott used a sports analogy to describe one of the school's strengths even as it takes its first baby steps.
"It's as if we have 40 first-round picks. These are the best of the best, and they want to be here at BYU," he said.
It just so happens that a former BYU football player, Dr. Andrew Stacey, is on the advisory council. Dr. Ott is staring down "a gigantic undertaking," said Dr. Stacey, an associate professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
"I could not imagine being in his shoes. I'm so grateful he's doing this. It sounds so scary. At the least, I just want to be helpful and serve him and and help him come up with ideas and solve some problems and figure out what the solutions to each of these issues is going to be," said Dr. Stacey, who was on BYU's football team in 2000 and again from 2003-06 after a church mission.
Dr. Ott acknowledged the pressure.
"It's the most complicated chessboard I've ever seen in my life," he told the Deseret News, "but every time we need something, the right person or the right set of circumstances appears."
The first person physically on the scene after Dr. Ott was Dustin Matsumori, Intermountain Health's vice president of corporate development. For a couple of months, they were the only two people working in temporary offices on University Avenue in Provo. The university hasn't announced a timeline for opening the school nor a location for the new building.
Matsumori is on loan from the giant healthcare network, which operates 30-plus hospitals and 400-plus clinics in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada. Intermountain Health Chief Strategy Officer Dan Liljenquist told the Deseret News he dedicated Matsumori 100% to BYU.
"Dustin knows healthcare well, and he knows the church well. It feels like he was prepared for this role," Liljenquist said.
Intermountain now has loaned BYU a second executive, David Rasmussen, director of its Project Management Office.
Intermountain has crystal clear reasons to partner with BYU. The national and regional medical communities are under severe strain as more than 70 million Baby Boomers retire, Liljenquist said. A full 25% of doctors and nurses are in that group, leaving the healthcare field just as their generation enters the most expensive and critical stage of health care.
The doctor shortage will strain every aspect of Intermountain's system, and Liljenquist said the University of Utah School of Medicine cannot train enough new doctors on its own to meet the needs of Intermountain Health, which already has to import a significant number of doctors into the region.
"We've been very concerned at Intermountain with increasing our pipeline of medical providers, particularly doctors," Liljenquist said. "We've been working really hard on nursing, but medical schools are another level of challenge. We need dozens of doctors. We need hundreds of doctors. There's a lot on the line, but it's really, really helpful to know that BYU is stepping up to start a medical school at a time of desperate need. We're very grateful for that."
The school and the hospital network still have miles to go in building out their collaboration. BYU medical students will need training programs that allow them to do rotations at local hospitals. Liljenquist said he suspects "this will be a systemwide partnership," meaning BYU students could be doing rotations at a hospital in Montana or a clinic in St. George, not just at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, directly next door to campus.
Liljenquist said it is a synergistic partnership.
"The university couldn't do this without an amount of partnership, like an Intermountain that has the scale and scope to do it, and we don't feel like we're in a position to start a medical school," he said.
It's also critical that BYU accelerate up the on-ramp to merge with the quality of the University of Utah's medical school.
"We want to make sure that we can accommodate effectively both medical schools," Liljenquist said, "because the state needs both of them at the highest level of performance."
Dr. Ott said Matsumori has been a critical right hand since the start. BYU's No. 1 priority is securing medical school accreditation, and while they had hired national accreditation specialists as consultants, Reese and Dr. Ott believed they needed an expert on campus. A volunteer adviser told them she didn't know any Latter-day Saints who are accreditation experts, but she suggested in November that if there were one, he or she would be found at the annual conference of the American Association of Medical Colleges that would start four days later in Atlanta.
Dr. Ott dispatched Matsumori, who got one of the last bookings at the hotel, checked in and knelt down in his room to pray for aid finding the help BYU needed. Matsumori then walked to the hotel's 3.9-million square feet conference center where 5,000 people milled about. On his way up an escalator to the session he'd registered to attend, a man behind him said, "Are you Dustin Matsumori?"
It was Derek Wilcox, director of Medical Education and Quality Improvement at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Wilcox had just come from a session with an ad hoc group on accreditation, where he learned that BYU had requested and been granted permission to attend despite not being accredited. Wilcox looked on his phone to see if someone from BYU had registered, saw Matsumori had and then read a Deseret News story about his appointment to BYU.
"When Derek looked up from his phone, he was standing right behind Dustin on the escalator," said Dr. Ott, who soon made Wilcox his first hire for the BYU medical school, other than Dr. Ott himself. Wilcox is the assistant dean of Accreditation and Quality Improvement.
"We have unending stories like this," Dr. Ott said. "I still get choked up by these events."
(Dr. Ott added the third medical school employee today, when a candidate accepted an offer to be an administrative assistant to the dean.)
The American Association of Medical Colleges won't recognize BYU's fledgling operation as a medical school until it reaches a certain level of the accreditation process. BYU has sent a letter of intent to the AAMC, giving it applicant status.
"The earliest we could have this preliminary level of accreditation that let's us say we're a medical school and we can advertise for students is a little less than 18 months to two years off," Dr. Ott said. "It's a long accreditation journey and there's an organizational design that needs to take place around mission, vision, values, a strategic plan and more. That's why we have all these working groups."
The first class of students could be on campus in two to three years.
The advisory council is coaching Reese and Dr. Ott on an array of issues -- accreditation, curriculum, how faculty appointments will be work at a community-based medical school without its own hospital, how the medical school building will be built and where and "how each of these things could affect student life and education, and then what what the enrollment looks like and how recruitment is going to look," said Dr. Stacey, the former football player.
Dr. Stacey is a practicing physician and academic who is an expert on ocular oncology, specifically an eye cancer known as retinoblastoma. He earned his medical degree from Ohio State University, did his residency at the University of Michigan and gained additional training in London. He splits his time between teaching medical students and residents, doing research in low- and middle-income countries -- particularly in sub-Saharan Africa -- and working and performing surgeries in his own clinics and operating rooms.
"Each of these things are things that people involved with academic medical centers are involved with every day," he said about the duties of the advisory council, "so it's something that many of us are quite facile with, but we will work together to come up with a plan of attack for how that is going to work at BYU, given the geographical variables and the medical training variables and the university's mission and the stated mission of the future medical school."
Another member of the advisory council has lived experience starting a religion-based medical school in Arizona. Dr. Randy Richardson helped Creighton University, a Jesuit Catholic school in Nebraska, open the Creighton School of Medicine in Phoenix. He is the regional dean and a pediatric radiologist.
"We're interested in partnering with BYU already and it hasn't even started yet," said Dr. Richardson, a Latter-day Saint and BYU alum who attended medical school at Loma Linda, a Seventh-day Adventist university in California.
Dr. Ott said the medical school deans at both Creighton and Loma Linda have confirmed their interest in working with BYU.
Dr. Richardson has consulted with Reese and Dr. Ott on the nuts and bolts of starting a school. He met Dr. Ott and Matsumori for the first time when he hosted them on a visit to Creighton's Phoenix site. He said BYU actually has a leg up on curriculum for the first two years of medical training.
"BYU is going to be really strong at putting together the first two years of basic sciences for a traditional medical school," Dr. Richardson said. "It's got the biochemistry, and the anatomy and physiology and the professors that will support that. The tricky part is the clinical years and putting together the rotations in pediatrics, OB-GYN, surgery and more for the third year and the electives needed for the fourth year. That's the bigger task, because BYU already has the education piece of this, as far as teaching students the basics of the body and function."
That bigger task requires a strong connection between Intermountain Health and BYU, he said, "so it helps that Dr. Ott is coming off years as a surgeon at Intermountain and that the network has loaned two of its executives to BYU.
"His connection there with Intermountain Health is going to be a huge, huge positive for this school, and something that's absolutely necessary to start a school," Dr. Richardson said. "I think this has great potential, and I think Mark Ott's the right guy."
Dr. Richardson said BYU has and will have huge national interest.
"The Latter-day Saint identity, like Catholic identity for us at Creighton, can turn off some people," he said, "but what I've been impressed with at Creighton is they reach out to all people of faith. If you want to come join with others in the mission of helping others, to try and serve, they're all about that.
"You're not going to have any problem getting physicians that want to be part of this. I think you'll have plenty that want to come and be part of it. I think you already have plenty of volunteer people who want to help without being on campus."
One of those is a retiring professor at a major medical school on the East Coast who called Dr. Ott and volunteered his time. Another is Dr. Heather Ridinger, an associate professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who practices adult primary care and has a decade of experience creating curriculum, innovating, teaching and mentoring medical students.
Dr. Ridinger is volunteering in her free time on BYU's working group on medical education.
"I am incredibly humbled and grateful to reconnect with BYU and to be a part of this historic work," she said in a statement.
Most of the 140 people who have joined the 15 BYU working groups are providing insight remotely. The groups are arranged to give advice on issues ranging from legal and risk management to student life experience, information technology and the finance, tax and accounting aspects of a medical school.
"It's a mix of some people from BYU, some people from Intermountain to people all over the country, not just members of the church," Dr. Ott said. "Some are ardent University of Utah fans. They have day jobs, they have families, they have church responsibilities, and they're doing this in their spare time.
"Some of them we will ultimately end up hiring, I'm positive, but none of them have that expectation. They're doing it because they've been moved by the Spirit of the Lord to participate in something they see as one of the greatest things they could be doing right now."