$50M LECOM at JU medical school makes its debut (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Daily Record) — Northeast Florida had zero four-year medical schools five months ago. It now has two.
The Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine at Jacksonville University (pictured above) opened Friday morning, prepared to welcome its inaugural class of roughly 75 students.
A massive three-story, 72,000-square-foot dark gray and white building quickly rose over the past year within an area designated by JU as its “Medical Mall.”
LECOM invested approximately $50 million in the Jacksonville campus, it said, a project expected to generate an estimated $91.1 million local economic impact.
“We made a calculated bet many, many years ago on healthcare,” JU Chancellor Tim Cost said.
Long before the trees at 5415 Dolphin Point Blvd. were felled, the then-president and four other university leaders took a folding table and a bottle of champagne out into the forest. That conversation laid the groundwork for the private university’s medical facilities.
Across the parking lot, the medical school integrates with other university services in the area, including the 104,000-square-foot Health Sciences Complex, School of Orthodontics and Occupational Therapy teaching facility and Dolphin Pointe Health Care, a 146-bed skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility.
The Jacksonville campus joins four other LECOM facilities nationwide, including another in Bradenton. Founded in 1992, the expansive medical school has become one of the nation’s largest, graduating more than 18,000 healthcare professionals.
Osteopathic medicine is one of the fastest-growing healthcare professions in the U.S., with the number of physicians climbing to nearly 135,000 in 2021 — an 80% percent increase over the past decade, according to the Osteopathic Medical Profession Report,
Of the students already committed to the local medical school, LECOM officials said 50% are from Florida, including about 35% from Jacksonville.
While the completion of LECOM at JU represents a major win for the private university investing so heavily in healthcare training, it’s also a boost for Jacksonville’s vast community of health systems.
Already, Baptist Health, UF Health St. Johns and AdventHealth are signed on to provide third- and fourth-year clinical training opportunities for LECOM’s students, according to a release. That includes developing a planned residency in internal medicine at Baptist, school officials said.
“Bringing the school is a key component from an undergraduate medical education,” Baptist CEO Matthew Zuino told the Business Journal. “The bricks and mortar is the first critical step, but continuing education beyond undergraduate becomes key.”
The Jacksonville campus building was worked on by kasper architects + associates, Meskel & Associates Engineering and Danis Construction.
Though LECOM at JU is the first four-year medical school within the city of Jacksonville, it’s not the first serving the region.
In March, Lincoln Memorial University unveiled a $36 million dual medical and veterinary campus in Orange Park. The two-building, 130,000-square-foot facility houses the LMU-DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine and the LMU-College of Veterinary Medicine at Orange Park.
Like LECOM at JU, Lincoln Memorial’s school will also welcome its inaugural cohorts this year, starting with 125 students per cohort and capping at 200 students, President Jason McConnell said at the time.
“Florida as a whole has had explosive population growth,” he said. “With the health ecosystem that already exists in Jacksonville — there’s Baptist, Mayo and UF Health — it makes sense because you’ve got to have those rotation sites, those hospital relations.”
Photo courtesy of Jacksonville University