Florida’s newest medical doctorate school (and Broward’s first) gets academic green light

Florida’s newest medical doctorate program can officially start accepting applications.

Nova Southeastern University, a private, nonprofit school with a main campus in Davie, earned preliminary accreditation for its new medical doctorate program this week. Final accreditation comes when the program — Broward’s first and Florida’s eighth — graduates its first class.

Now that the program has the green light, applications will open by the end of the month and classes will begin in August 2018. NSU will accept 50 students in the first year, a smaller class than the nearby University of Miami or Florida International University, which each have around 150 medical students per class.

That’s not the only thing the new program will do differently from its peers.

Rather than the usual breakdown of two years in lecture and two years in clerkship (a sort of medical internship), NSU’s program has a clerkship-heavy split: one-and-a-half years in lecture and two-and-a-half years in clerkship.

The lecture portions themselves are focused on active learning, said Paula Wales, NSU’s executive associate dean for academic and student affairs. In the regular lectures, there will be some kind of activity every 15 minutes to keep students engaged. Other classes are “flipped,” where students do all the learning at home and apply the knowledge in an activity in class.

The cornerstone of the new program is the “problem based learning” activities. Every week, small groups of seven or eight students will be faced with a different patient scenario and work together to solve the problem.

“It’s not about getting the right diagnosis; it’s about figuring out what they don’t know and problem solving in a group,” Wales said. “Healthcare is rarely deliberated in isolation.”

One of the foundations of NSU’s new program is intraprofessional collaboration. It’s baked into the curriculum, which was designed by professors in medicine, business and law, and into the campus itself. NSU plans to eventually build a 200,000-square-foot medical education building, but for the time being medical students will share space with all the other health science students on the Davie campus.

The new building will bring more medical simulations (robotic dummies on which students practice medical techniques) to add on to the simulation center on campus and the shared space arrangement NSU has with Broward College and its simulation lab.

In between every lecture module or clerkship rotation, which are focused on topics like hematology and psychiatry, students have a week of “RIA” — Reflection, Integration and Assessment — with classmates from the other schools.

Those classmates will also join the medical students in the brand new 200-bed hospital being built on NSU’s campus by the for-profit Hospital Corporation of America East Florida. Builders will break ground on the teaching and research hospital, which will also hold continuing medical education seminars for the community, by the end of the year.

“This campus, in my opinion, will be the birthplace for a lot of things that benefit our community and our economy,” said Dr. Johannes Vieweg, the founding dean of the college. “We want to be a community leader here.”

Part of that leadership initiative, Vieweg said, includes jump-starting the research and development industry in Broward with the school’s new $100 million Center for Collaborative Research. The center was built to help propel NSU’s research to higher levels, and instead of relying on government grants for funding, the center makes money from research partnerships with local startups and the hospital.

“Research drives everything that we do,” Vieweg said. “We can help the economic sector ask next-generation questions of their products.”

NSU’s new medical program is the youngest in South Florida after FIU, which started its program in 2009. In the coming years, NSU will also open another medical campus in Tampa, where students can earn degrees in osteopathic medicine, which is similar to an M.D. degree, but more focuses on holistic medicine.

Tuition for the M.D. program runs about $51,000 a year for Floridians and $54,000 for out-of state students, about the same cost as the D.O. program.

Wales said NSU expects about 4,000 applications for the 50 open spots in the medical doctorate program. If accepted to the interview stage, candidates will rotate through multiple mini interviews with several faculty members.

“We’re going to be very selective about who we let in because we want to make leaders and we want them to flourish in the program,” Wales said. “The community doesn’t know the caliber of doctors we’re going to make. They’re going to be wonderful.”

This story was originally published October 13, 2017 at 6:11 PM with the headline "Florida’s newest medical doctorate school (and Broward’s first) gets academic green light."