Jacksonville University partners with LECOM to launch city’s first four-year medical school (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Jacksonville University is partnering with Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, the nation’s largest osteopathic academic health system, to establish the city’s first four-year medical school.
LECOM at Jacksonville University will be housed in a newly built extension of Jacksonville University’s 104,000-square-foot, $30 million Applied Health Sciences complex located at the north end of the Arlington campus.
Eight to 14 acres of land are available on the north side of the campus, university president Tim Cost said, and is expected to be purchased by LECOM for the facility.
LECOM applied for accreditation for the Jacksonville campus Oct. 12 and is under review by the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation. Once that is complete, the school will embark on constructing the facility.
Initial plans for LECOM at Jacksonville University are to enroll 75 students in fall 2026, with the class size growing to 150 students per year by 2030.
Community support for the medical school includes long-term clinical agreements with the region’s preeminent healthcare providers, including Baptist Health, Flagler Health+, AdventHealth and Brooks Rehabilitation. Medical students will have opportunities to complete hands-on clinical rotations with partners during their third and fourth years.
“Baptist and Flagler felt that the teaching initiative was important to what they were trying to do and we went from there,” Cost said. “Everybody we talked to believed the partnership was valuable to them.”
The medical school announcement comes shortly after JU launched its College of Law, a project that the city contributed $5 million toward. JU is not seeking incentives for the medical school.
While the process for a law school and a medical school are different, the impetus is similar, Cost said.
“It was looking into places where we thought we could be helpful in the community,” Cost said. “We were the largest city in America that didn’t have a law school when we made that announcement. It’s the same thing here: We’re the largest city in America without a four-year medical school. So we’re glad to be answering the call.”
The idea for the medical school developed organically as JU ramped up its focus on applied health sciences in the years since Cost came on as president in 2013, adding majors in things like kinesiology, health care informatics and more. The university now has more than 450 clinical partnerships to support the School of Applied Health Sciences.
“As we were strategizing down that path, we kept saying, is there a natural link to a medical school,” said Cost, who held high level executive positions with biomedical companies before coming to JU. “We did not say, ‘how do we get a medical school in here?’ We said, ‘Where does this take us?'”
About five years ago — and more actively starting two years ago — Cost and Provost Christine Sapienza started looking at partners around the country, which led to the conversations with the Pennsylvania-based school.
“They were big, they were smart,” Cost said. “We found we saw the world similarly: that we should be preparing people to go and do important work.”
LECOM has four campuses, with locations in New York and two in Pennsylvania. In 2004, it opened a branch in Bradenton.
As well as attracting students from elsewhere and providing a path for JU students, the medical school will have a broader impact on the community, Cost said.
“It begins to bring a different kind of brain power to town,” the JU president said. “Different corporations come to be with talent. The idea is you’re intensifying and accelerating the kind of conversation that’s going to be held around health education.”