Why the nation’s largest medical school wanted to come to Jacksonville (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — The first four-year medical school in Jacksonville is the culmination of a dream and an endorsement of the city, the provost of Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine said on Wednesday.
“We meet here today as a result of an idea. It speaks to one’s ability to dream and envision,” said Silvia Ferretti, who co-founded the medical college in Erie in 1988. “Jacksonville is forward thinking. It has a strategy to be the best, so it likes excellence in everything it does.”
The school — with tuition costing roughly $37,000 to $40,000 a year — is looking to open its doors with 75 students in fall 2026, with the class size growing to 150 students per year by 2030.
The partnership with Jacksonville University which will bring the school here was announced to a room full of healthcare luminaries and community supporters gathered in the Health Sciences Complex at JU.
The new school will be built near that complex, in what JU is calling the Jacksonville University Medical Mall, an expanding mixed-use health care plaza established at the north end of the university’s Arlington.
The school will be built by LECOM, with JU President Tim Cost estimating a $50 million project spanning 70,000 square feet.
The growth of that complex and the students attracted to the area by LECOM at Jacksonville University will have ripple effects throughout the area, Cost said.
“I think this is going to be an economic shot in the arm for not only Jacksonville but Arlington,” he said. “We are about education, but we welcome economic development.”
LECOM at Jacksonville University will be led by Travis Smith, who is currently associate dean of clinical assessment integration at LECOM. Dean is a graduate of LECOM Medical School in Bradenton and completed his residency at UF Health Shands.
“To get to this point is a dream come true and a real milestone,” Smith said. “I received great mentorship at LECOM and loved attending medical school. Because it was fun, I excelled, and I hope to replicate that same tone here in Jacksonville.”
Smith added that LECOM is committed to diversity, aiming to be a school that represents the city in age, gender and ethnicity.
That will be important, as one of the hoped-for effects of the school is to shore up the number of physicians on the First Coast, which — like the rest of Florida — has a shortage of doctors.
“We need to train our physicians and keep them here in our community,” David Rice, chief physician executive for Flagler Health+, one of almost a dozen health care institutions in the area that will provide clinical training to LECOM students. “This had been an easy sell for me.”