Hofstra opens School of Medicine with North Shore-LIJ

What started with a handshake after a 45-minute breakfast four years ago is now a reality: Hofstra University School of Medicine is now officially open for business.

Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz and Michael Dowling, chief executive of North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, who hatched the medical school plans at The Garden City Hotel, said Tuesday that it has been given preliminary accreditation by the state and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the national body that accredits medical schools.

Dowling, who heads the third-largest nonprofit, secular health network in the country, said the partnership - in which North Shore-LIJ doctors would serve as faculty - would put both institutions on a bigger national stage. "This elevates us completely," he said. "This changes where we go in the future and how we get there."

Rabinowitz said he hoped the medical school would attract research and biotech businesses. "This is great for the Long Island regional economy," he said.

By using an innovative curriculum that focuses on patient care and critical thinking rather than on rote learning, it also could serve as a model for how medical students are taught, said Dr. Lawrence Smith, the dean of the new school and chief medical officer for the health system.

On July 1, the school will begin accepting its first class of 40 students. Eventually that will grow to a maximum of 400 students at the four-year school. It will be the first new allopathic medical school in the state - it will confer doctor of medicine degrees - in more than 40 years. Stony Brook's School of Medicine, the other Island medical school, has 450 students.

Classes will begin next summer on campus in the former headquarters of the New York Jets in Hempstead, refurbished with a $12.5-million state grant. Dowling said the medical school's annual budget won't be available until August.

Gone are what June Scarlett, associate dean of administration, and Dr. Veronica Catanese, senior associate dean for academic affairs, described as a warren of offices, weight rooms and a sauna full of algae. These have been replaced by a large lecture hall, library and conference rooms where teams of students will gather with one or more of the 900-member North Shore-LIJ faculty who have been appointed to the school.

Smith said the building was designed around the medical school's holistic approach that encourages "professionalism and humanism."

He toured 25 medical schools and even business schools, extracting the best from each. The result, he said, is a curriculum that will focus on teaching students to think critically and compassionately about the patient.

Students will be required to become certified as EMTs and ride with ambulances. "They will go to homes and see what their problems are," Smith said.

They will work in community hospitals and in doctors' offices to get a realistic view of how medicine is practiced. And instead of simply memorizing facts, students will be taught in small teams and will deal, from the very beginning, with real cases from the health system. "There will be no multiple-choice tests," Smith said. "It is a little bit intellectually daring."