Feature: Human Medicine Poised to Serve Future Needs

With the completion of the Secchia Center in Grand Rapids, MSU’s College of Human Medicine is poised to serve the expanding needs of the state.

Faced with an increasing demand for physicians and a desire to expand its medical research, MSU’s College of Human Medicine needed to grow.

“There’s no staying the same in the current economic climate,” says Marsha Rappley, MD (CHM ’84), dean of the college. “If you stay the same, you get smaller.”

Seventy-five miles west of MSU’s East Lansing campus, Grand Rapids needed a medical school to complete its growing life sciences sector.

“From our perspective, a medical school brings research, brings intellectual property, brings jobs,” says Birgit Klohs, president and CEO of the Grand Rapids-based Right Place, a nonprofit economic development organization.

Thus, after years of courtship, a marriage was formed, leading to the dedication in September, 2010, of the Secchia Center, a new seven-story headquarters for the College of Human Medicine in downtown Grand Rapids. That’s also when the Grand Rapids campus will begin offering all four years of medical education, enrolling its first class of 100 first-year medical students.

For more than four decades, third- and fourth-year medical students have continued their education in Grand Rapids-area hospitals, doctors’ offices and clinics after spending their first two years in East Lansing. Beginning in the late 1990s, MSU officials and Grand Rapids business and civic leaders began talking informally about expanding the college’s program there.

Peter Secchia, ’62, former U.S. ambassador to Italy and a devoted Spartan, spoke to then-MSU President Peter McPherson about opening a four-year medical school in Grand Rapids.

“I don’t want to give the impression I was all-knowing,” Secchia says. “I had the vision. The stars lined up.”

Others who shared that vision included the heads of the Spectrum Health System, which operates Butterworth, Blodgett, Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital and five other West Michigan hospitals; the leaders of Saint Mary’s Health Care, another growing hospital in Grand Rapids; and the Van Andel Institute, a medical research organization. All were interested in seeing MSU expand its presence.

A 2003 study commissioned by the Right Place identified a medical school as an important component for Grand Rapids to become a life sciences center.

“We’re trying to make this a significant life sciences community,” Spectrum CEO Richard Breon says. “The piece that was missing was a medical school. There’s a real pride factor in being able to say you have a medical school in your community.”

A medical school should help the hospitals recruit physicians, including those who want to teach future doctors as well as treat patients, and it should lead to more medical research and clinical trials, giving West Michigan patients access to advanced treatments.

“It was inevitable this would take place,” Saint Mary’s CEO Philip McCorkle says. “We all recognized wanting to make Grand Rapids a medical center, a destination people would want to come to.

“With this kind of cooperation, we’re going to design the doctors of the future.”

For MSU, expanding its program in Grand Rapids also made sense. Faced with a growing need for primary care physicians, the university planned to double its medical school enrollment. Grand Rapids had the hospitals and physicians to help train those future doctors, which is critical for MSU to continue its community integrated approach to medical education. The College of Human Medicine also needed to expand its medical research, notes MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon.

The presence of the Van Andel Institute, a nonprofit medical research facility founded in the mid-1990s by the late Jay Van Andel, co-founder of Amway, made Grand Rapids all the more attractive, she says.

“It’s been a struggle to have a community-based medical school and still have the power of research,” Simon says. “With the partnership of the Van Andel Institute, the possibilities in Grand Rapids grew exponentially.”

Making those possibilities a reality, however, would require getting several players, including some that viewed each other as competitors, to work together. Grand Action, a nonprofit downtown development organization, convened a stakeholders group—including the area’s hospitals, MSU, Grand Valley State University, the Right Place and the Van Andel Institute—to study the idea.

Months later, Van Andel Institute CEO David Van Andel, who chaired the stakeholders group, called for a vote: Did the members want to proceed with expanding the medical school in Grand Rapids?

“I’d gotten to the point that, alright, everybody’s talked about this. I’m done talking. Are we going to do it or not?” Van Andel recalls.

The response was a unanimous “yes.” It was a turning point, but many details remained to be worked out.

“Then we got to the financing,” says Steve Heacock, the then-chief administrative officer of the Van Andel Institute assigned to guide the stakeholder group’s research. “We weren’t going to get any money from the Legislature. It’s got to make sense in the numbers.”

Grand Action undertook a public fundraising campaign. Peter Secchia and his wife, Joan, ’64, became the naming donors. Amway co-founder Richard DeVos also made a substantial donation, as did other philanthropists and community members. Spectrum Health agreed to give $85 million, including $55 million toward the cost of the new building and $30 million for research. The Van Andel Institute pledged $16 million for research, and Saint Mary’s offered $10 million for education and research.

“The university saw in the leadership of this community the commitment to a high-quality medical school,” Dean Rappley says. “There was no other community that could make this level of commitment.

 “Grand Rapids is a region that deserves a medical school. It was very clear to me that this community had the educational base, and it has a quality of medical care that is recognized across the country.”

It also is known for its relatively low medical costs. “That’s a model for the nation,” Rappley says. “That’s the perfect place to educate our physicians of the future.”

Coming from California, one of those future doctors, Alonso Martin del Campo, knew little about Grand Rapids until he enrolled in MSU’s College of Human Medicine three years ago. He spent his first year on the East Lansing campus, then became part of the first group of second-year medical students to continue their studies in Grand Rapids.

“I was pretty impressed,” del Campo says. “I felt it was an up and coming center for medical innovations. There are a lot of research opportunities here.”

Now in his third year, del Campo has been doing a series of clerkships in the area’s hospitals and clinics, giving him experience in different aspects of medicine. During a general surgery rotation at Spectrum’s Butterworth Hospital, he assisted Dr. David Figg in removing a woman’s gall bladder. At Clinica Santa Maria, a Saint Mary’s Health Care facility serving a largely Hispanic population, he helped treat low income patients, many of them uninsured. It reminded him of the clinic where his mother took him and his siblings in California.

“I’d like to serve everybody, but in particular people who are underserved, where primary care is needed,” del Campo says. “I think it’s because you can make a difference in people’s lives. You can prevent heart surgery from ever happening, can prevent liver failure, can prevent diabetes.”

That patient-centered approach is a hallmark of how MSU trains its medical students.  MSU was a pioneer in community-integrated medical education, sending its students from the classroom to the hospitals and doctors offices, where they learn from practitioners. By expanding its research, the school’s administrators and faculty plan to make new treatments more readily available to patients.

“It’s the land-grant philosophy to move innovation as quickly as possible to benefit people,” Simon says.

Since announcing its expansion in Grand Rapids, the College of Human Medicine and its Grand Rapids partners have attracted leading researchers with a combined portfolio of nearly $25 million in National Institutes of Health funding. These include two significant research centers for excellence designations: a $6.8 million federal grant for a center for women’s reproductive research, and a $6.2 million federal grant for a Morris K. Udall Center of Excellence for Parkinson’s disease research.

MSU officials plan to increase enrollment from the current 568 medical students statewide to 800 by 2013. While Rappley is moving her office to the new Grand Rapids headquarters, Simon emphasizes that MSU’s commitment to medical education in East Lansing and Lansing remains strong. First- through fourth-year students will continue their studies in those two cities. Other third- and fourth-year students will study in community campuses in Flint, Kalamazoo, Traverse City, Midland, Saginaw and the Upper Peninsula.

MSU also has formed partnerships with Grand Valley State University and Ferris State University, allowing its medical students to work and study in teams with the nursing, pharmacy, physician assistant and other students from those schools, since that is how they will work in the real world.

While its students are studying all over the state, the College of Human Medicine remains one medical school sharing faculty, administrators and other resources, Simon emphasizes.

“The state has always been our campus,” she says. “We’re not duplicating resources. There’s a synergy between the work that will happen on all the campuses, but particularly between East Lansing and Grand Rapids. It’s headquartered in Grand Rapids, but it’s a community-focused medical school that benefits all of Michigan.

“With this commitment, the community-focused medical school competes with the best medical schools in the world.”