On Aug. 8, 2011, 50 students will walk through the doors of Oakland University’s William Beaumont School of Medicine. Those 50 students will be the first class of a new privately funded medical program offered by the school.

“We are, for the first time in the history of American medical education, seeing a combination of a university and an integrated health care delivery system,” said Robert Folberg, the founding dean of SOM and chief academic officer of Beaumont hospitals.

According to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, SOM is one of seven schools with LCME’s “preliminary accreditation” status, which means the program may begin to recruit applicants and accept applications for enrollment.

“Our deadline for applications was on Nov. 15, and we obtained 3,237 applications through an organization called AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service),” said Christina Grabowski, assistant dean for admissions.

Of those 3,237 applications, only 50 students will be accepted into the program.

“To eliminate down to the 50, we’re doing a holistic review, which means we’re reading the entire file and looking for attributes and experiences in addition to academic measurements,” Graboski said. “We’re going to be looking at a student’s involvement, their commitment to community service activities and other extracurricular activities, including team work.”

The SOM was the first school beta site for a program instituted by the Association of American Medical Colleges to use holistic review for accepting applications.

“This is a lot more than just grades and an MCAT score,” Folberg said. “It opens us up to recruit a student that we think, with our curriculum … will be totally engaged, and that’s just what Michigan needs.”

Folberg also said that students who have a lower grade point average and MCAT score will not necessarily be declined from the school.

To apply to the school, students send their application electronically through the central AMCAS, submit three letters of recommendation and write a personal statement as part of AMCAS. Once the application is received at the school, they are invited to fill out a supplemental application that includes two additional essays.

“We read their applications and invite for an interview,” Graboski said. “We have 300 students coming in for an interview.”

Different from many medical schools, the OUWB students will train within one system, Folberg said.

“We can ensure that the quality of their education is consistent wherever they are inside the system,” Folberg said. “More importantly, American medical education now is in a very exciting medical place because health care is changing.”

A study commissioned by the Michigan State Medical Society (MSMS) called the “Michigan Health Care Workforce Study” said that right now, the state of Michigan is short every type of physician except for one – emergency medicine.

“What this school did very carefully is look back and look at the ecosystem in Michigan,” Folberg said. “Our focus is really clear and is based on what the community needs. We did it this way because the community needs may change over time and the school will change with it.”

According to Graboski, OUWB has an integrated curriculum that many students are excited about.

Graboski said a typical medical school has two years of sciences including basic science, classroom and lab work followed by two years of clinical rotations.

“We’re bringing some clinical experiences into year one and year two, so students have exposure to first stimulations and then standardized patients and then later to real patients within their first two years, so they start to see how what they’re learning in the basic sciences applies to the clinical environment. They will spend one day a week at Beaumont Hospital starting with day one, which is very nice.”

For more information, visit www.oakland.edu/medicine