Sacramento’s Sutter Health plans medical school in Silicon Valley
Sutter Health on Friday announced plans for the health system’s first dedicated medical school, in partnership with Santa Clara University.
The announcement was the latest in a series of expansion efforts by the Sacramento-based health system, which has opened dozens of new ambulatory centers in the past few years and hired more than 2,500 clinicians in Northern California. Sutter opened its Arden Care Center in December, and has major projects in Elk Grove and Folsom, plus a planned, 120,000-square-foot sports medicine center downtown.
In March the health system announced plans to combine with Minneapolis-based Allina Health, a deal that will represent Sutter’s largest out-of-state footprint yet.
Sutter Health President and CEO Warner Thomas said many of the system’s expansion moves have been driven by leaders’ recognition that there are “access challenges” for patients in Sacramento and “really everywhere in our system.” The move to establish a dedicated medical school, similarly, was motivated by doctor shortages, particularly as the aging U.S. population needs increasingly complex care, and as the health system works to backfill retiring clinicians.
“We need to really build the pipeline of physicians that are coming into Sutter Health,” Thomas said in an interview.
The Mark & Mary Stevens School of Medicine will be named for the couple who have gifted $175 million to its endowment. Mary Stevens attended the university, and serves on the board of trustees.
The campus will be five miles from the university, near the hospital system’s Sutter East Santa Clara Campus, and near its Sutter West Santa Clara Campus, a planned, 272-bed medical center expected to open in 2031.
The east campus will include classrooms and simulation labs, and students will do clinical training at the west campus hospital.
Sutter has more than 30 physician residency and fellowship training programs already, with schools including UC Davis, Dartmouth College, Touro University and others.
But Friday’s announcement signals the health system’s intent to more aggressively grow its academic programs.
It has already expanded its graduate medical education programs over the past few years, Thomas said, and plans to have 800 to 900 residents and fellows by 2030, from around 200 in 2022. Sutter has a large and growing residency program at the Roseville hospital, another in Modesto, and leaders want to expand residencies at Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, Thomas said.
Many of the students at the Santa Clara University medical school will do residency programs in the Sacramento area.
“Even though this medical school is in Santa Clara, there will be ancillary benefits to the Sacramento area,” he said.
Sutter Health said the medical school’s students and faculty will work with the health system’s tech innovation center in San Francisco, the university’s center for “Applied AI and Human Potential” and colleges of ethics, theology and business, among others.
“We have a societal need, and it’s the university’s responsibility to meet that need,” said James Glaser, provost and executive vice president at Santa Clara University.
Admissions likely won’t begin for a few years, Glaser said, as the school must first secure its accreditation. The university will begin with smaller numbers, but will eventually have around 400 to 500 students.
