By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

A potential medical school at Missouri Southern State University could be the first public-private university partnership in Missouri and significantly address the physician shortage in the southern half of the state.

And, the plan that medical program officials are calling “groundbreaking” would come at no cost to the state or taxpayers.

That’s according to presentations Tuesday by officials of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, MSSU and Freeman Health System to about 50 Southwest Missouri community leaders. The presentations were a first step in seeking community support for the project — something MSSU will have to prove for the state to OK the partnership.

The proposal is for the Kansas City university, which already is accredited with the Higher Learning Commission and the American Osteopathic Association, to create a four-year osteopathic medical doctorate program at Missouri Southern.

Students in the program would pay KCUMB’s private university tuition, about $40,000 a year, and would be enrolled at the Kansas City school. KCUMB would create and fund the estimated 60 new jobs for the program, said Karen Pletz, KCUMB president and chief executive officer. The Kansas City school also might pay part of the salaries of some existing faculty members in MSSU’s bioscience undergraduate programs, Pletz said.

Missouri Southern would provide space for the program in its new, 85,000-square-foot Health Sciences Building, currently under construction.

Dwight Douglas, chairman of an MSSU Board of Governors committee that is studying the medical school, said the new program also would require another building to house anatomy/cadaver labs. That building would cost an estimated $7 million. Douglas said MSSU officials think they have found funding for half of that, but they need donors to help pay for the rest.

With this partnership, Missouri Southern wouldn’t have the benefit of the medical-school tuition, but university officials think the school would obtain increased enrollment in undergraduate classes because of the new graduate program and would benefit from that tuition.

“No public money will be used to support this,” Pletz said of the program. “KCUMB will fund the medical school, yet the boost to MSSU is in being able to recruit students.”

Challenges, steps

Officials agreed that the biggest challenges to the project are obtaining approval from the Missouri Coordinating Board for Higher Education, creating an infrastructure of regional hospitals where students could do clinical rotations, and finding enough space on the MSSU campus for the program.

The first step in having the program up and running by the target date of fall 2011 is for the state board to approve the partnership. MSSU President Bruce Speck said via a prerecorded presentation that he has broached the issue with the board, and KCUMB is submitting the paperwork to have the program approved. Letters of community support like the ones handed out during the meeting Tuesday will be submitted along with that application.

Pletz said the Higher Learning Commission and the American Osteopathic Association also will have to approve the partnership. She estimated the whole procedure will take 18 months.