Collegiate Times

While crews of construction workers have begun building the physical structure of the new Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, administrators are putting in hours of work into the less visible, though no less onerous task of building the school's institutional foundation.

"We're what's called an applicant school right now," said Dean Cynda Johnson. "We need to get preliminary accreditation before July 1, 2009 or we can't begin recruiting applicants."

The new medical school is part of Roanoke's Riverside Corporate Center, a redevelopment project designed to create a business park on South Jefferson Street at Reserve Avenue. It will be a joint venture between Tech and Carilion Clinic, a Roanoke-based not-for-profit health care organization.

"We have a great pool of people to draw from both at Carilion and Virginia Tech," Johnson said.

Each entity will own half of the new school, though a legal agreement includes several clauses that allow Carilion to transfer its share of the operation to Tech. On Sept. 17, crews broke ground at the Jefferson Street site, but academic officials have been working on gaining accreditation for the new endeavor since summer.

"We initially had the first two years down to where we were putting names on the design teams in our database, then the requirements changed," Johnson said.

"We only had broad strokes for our third and fourth year curricula. Now we've had to be much more detailed," Johnson said. "We had 1,200 pages before they changed."

The school is designed to focus on medical research, patterned after Harvard Medical School's Health Sciences and Technology program and the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner College of Medicine. The program will have small class sizes and be dedicated to training physician researchers according to a Carilion press release.

"We're drawing heavily on Carilion's and Virginia Tech's pool of experienced staff," Johnson said. "We have many, many talented people at Carilion who have experience not just in clinical, but science PhD's as well."

The curriculum initially called for an expanded, five-year term. After bringing in experienced staff, they decided the school could accomplish the same goals in four.

"When we really drilled down we realized the group process we're using allowed students to learn this material faster than was originally thought," Johnson said. "We streamlined the whole process down to four years."

The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine will host a relatively small class size of 42 students a year compared to the 100-plus class sizes at many other medical schools, Associate Dean Richard Vari said.

"We need to have a small class size to accommodate the needs of our curriculum," Johnson said. "After the first-year research basics the students will have a three-year longitudinal study using real cases and real patients which will ultimately result in a publishable research paper."

In addition to training students to be clinical doctors, the school's goal is to train research physicians who wish to make research part of their medical career according to a Tech press release.

"Students will choose research mentors after their first year," Johnson said. "Students will meet in small groups during the week to after the first day when the case is presented to work on the case."

All students will receive training in research methods, conduct original research and write a thesis as a condition of graduation, in addition to the established medical school curriculum.

"We have a self-taught, adult learning style with some lecture time, but primarily focused on a team approach," Johnson said.