Sixty of the 67 counties in Alabama have a shortage of primary care physicians.
Auburn University's new medical college will begin enrolling students fall 2015 and will provide a mission for students to help with this problem.
"(Our students) will be leading lives of purpose and significance," said John Rocovich, founder and chairman of the board of directors of Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. "They will be able to prevent lives needlessly lost."
Auburn University will collaborate with Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, or VCOM, to establish the medical school. VCOM is originally based in Blacksburg, Va.
Dixie Tooke-Rawlins, dean and executive vice president of VCOM, said some of Auburn's executives visited the Blacksburg and South Carolina campuses to see if VCOM was the right fit before the collaboration was made final.
"(Auburn) said basically to VCOM, 'You know what you're doing and we like the type of medical school you've built, along with the mission,'" Tooke-Rawlins said.
Tooke-Rawlins believes Auburn and VCOM's missions are on the same wavelength.
"The opportunity to help out many people of Alabama is what attracted (VCOM) originally to the collaboration," Tooke-Rawlins said.
With $5 million invested into the college and none of it coming from state funding, President Jay Gogue made sure he could trust the people he was working with.
"Any partnership that is created is created on the basis of trust," Gogue said. "We've been talking about this for a year, and I know VCOM and a lot of the people in collaboration with Auburn are good people. We look forward to making this (collaboration) work."
Auburn University is also in collaboration with Alabama A&M and Tuskegee University.
This new campus will provide students with the opportunity to receive a D.O./Ph.D. dual degree, an MBH or MBA degree.
The University and VCOM will work in tandem with one another.
"Students and faculty of both VCOM and the Auburn medical college will be able to share research programs and facilities, to work with Auburn's sports medicine faculty, as well as have increasing access to national institutes of health and department of defense funding through joint research programs," Rocovich said.
Jimmy Sanford, chair holder of the Auburn Research and Technology Foundation, said this college would be separate from Auburn University in that it will have its own admissions, but students who attend this college will share the same amenities as the rest of Auburn University students.
"There will be an articulation between Auburn University and the medical school where they share IT services and infirmary services, libraries, that kind of thing," Sanford said.
The medical college will recruit professors from anywhere and everywhere, Sanford said.
Rocovich said the overall mission is to add doctors to the workforce, to produce osteopathic research benefits to students in the state of Alabama and to improve the lifestyle in Auburn.
"We work so hard to get medical education right to produce physicians with missionary hearts," Rocovich said.
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