A venture capital group and medical entrepreneur have partnered to bring a new offering to St. Louis’ wide array of pre-medical training programs: Ponce Health Sciences University, a for-profit institution with local offices in the Globe Building downtown that offers a one-year Master of Science in Medical Sciences.
David Lenihan – who has just about every advanced degree (MBA, JD, PhD in neuroscience) except an MD – is the medical entrepreneur, and he recruited as chancellor for the St. Louis program Kenneth W. Dobbins, the former president of Southeast Missouri State University, who also has an MBA and PhD but not an MD. University Venture Corporation is the venture capital firm, and the school is named for the city in Puerto Rico that hosts its flagship campus, which is a full-fledged medical school that grants MDs, among other advanced degrees.
Lenihan brought to Ponce an analytic model that he said offers “a new way to deliver curriculum” – and one where black and Hispanic pre-medical students fare better – that he developed as dean at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, based in Harlem.
“We looked at the data, and your verbal scores have no predictive value to whether you succeed in medical school,” Lenihan told The American. “So we got rid of it. Black and Hispanic students tend to do not as well on their verbal scores, so suddenly a lot more black and Hispanic students were qualifying.”
Of course, most medical schools can afford to be selective, rather than look for ways to admit students whose scores are less competitive. But Touro was at first a “start-up,” Lenihan said, founded in 2007, and as such not a first choice for the most promising pre-medical students considering a doctorate in Osteopathy. So this inclusive strategy was, in part, born of necessity.
“And,” Lenihan said, “our students did just as good on their boards” as the more competitive students admitted to more established schools.
Lenihan brought the same approach to Ponce when University Venture Corporation acquired Ponce Health Sciences University and hired Lenihan to operate it. He said his methods of composing risk profiles and data analytics for pre-medical and medical students are more accurate than those employed by traditional medical schools – and also happen to do better at grooming physicians from underrepresented minority groups.
“We track students literally day-to-day,” Lenihan said. “If an A student drops to a B, something happened. Most medical schools don’t care. But if something for the student is about to snowball and I know ahead of time, I can do something.” In a start-up for-profit setting, of course, student retention is worth money.
What is in it for venture capitalists, other than more tuition from fewer dropouts? Believe it or not, more diversity among medical professionals – which has economic value.
“Personal interaction in the medical space is worth hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars,” Lenihan said. “It’s how well you can connect. Cultural sensitivity has economic value.”
This is not feel-good rhetoric. Patient satisfaction now figures significantly in reimbursement rates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and CMS also penalizes hospital readmissions when reimbursing medical providers. And Lenihan’s data show that culturally sensitive doctors deliver both higher patient satisfaction scores and lower readmissions.
The numbers are not small; they are definitely in venture-capital territory. “If you can improve patient satisfaction by 5 percent,” Lenihan said, “that’s worth $2.4 trillion.”
That is the big picture. Though Lenihan envisions opening a hospital in North St. Louis that trains black doctors with high patient satisfaction scores and low readmission rates among their black patients – delivering culturally sensitive, lucrative health care – Ponce-St. Louis, at the moment, presents a very small picture. It offers two semesters of basic medical science education. The pitch to prospective student doesn’t tout only the program’s pre-medical training. “Our graduates can work in an array of healthcare-related research areas,” the website states, “are able to pursue a pharmacy degree or career in the pharmaceutical industry, or become a college or high school STEM instructor.”
For more information, visit http://stlouis.psm.edu, email stl-admissions@psm.edu or call 314-499-6540.
