Humana pledges $15M to medical school
Gift meant to defray startup costs for UH
As the health care ground continues to shift, sometimes surprising alliances emerge.
In Houston, one such pairing has formed with the announcement Tuesday of a collaboration between the planned University of Houston’s College of Medicine and insurance giant Humana, which has pledged a $15 million gift over 10 years to help defray startup and operational costs. It is the first major gift by a large corporation to the future medical school’s campaign to raise $1 billion, said Dr. Steve Spann, founding dean of the UH College of Medicine.
Part of that money will go to the creation of the Humana Integrated Health System Science Institute, which will unite the proposed medical school with UH’s colleges of nursing, pharmacy, social work and optometry, Spann said.
He acknowledged that a medical school-insurance company partnership is not common, since insurers and health care providers are often at odds. But in the long, Spann said, the partnership makes sense.
“There’s just a great alignment between their goals and ours,” he said.
Those shared priorities include an emphasis in population health, which studies outcomes of specific demographics, the training of primary care physicians and a focus on expanding value-based care, which translates into better medical care at lower costs.
Humana’s gift will also fund endowed chairs in each of the health care disciplines at the university, Spann said.
Dr. Roy Beveridge, Humana chief medical officer, called the gift an investment aimed at developing clinicians who recognize “the need to emphasize value over the volume of health care.”
The new medical school would
become the fourth in Houston region. While still awaiting final approval, the goal is to enroll an inaugural class of 30 students in the fall of 2020. UH is expected to submit its application for accreditation Dec. 1, kicking off a process that can take up to two years, Spann said.
The UH College of Medicine will be the first new medical school in Houston in nearly a half-century. And while the other marquee schools in the area typically graduate medical specialists, the UH medical school will emphasize primary care medicine and serving lower-income populations.
A study by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that Texas is ranked 47th out of 50 states for having an adequate number of primary care physicians for its population.