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A new medical school, costing $100 million dollars to create, aims to educate and encourage students into becoming primary care physicians, a profession that is often less popular in the medical field. Michael Ellison, who will have the responsibility and task of picking the college's very first medical class, will be the school's first associate dean of admissions. The new establishment will be known as the Frank H. Netter School of Medicine located in Quinnipiac University at Hamden, CT.

The school aims to gear its medical students toward a career in primary care practice, which the school believes is necessary and advantageous. After the approval of the Affordable Care Act, which will be fully in effect by 2014, the demand for primary care physicians will be on the rise. The new healthcare law will make access for health insurance easier for more people, who would ideally have the means of seeing a doctor more frequently than before. The Frank H. Netter School of Medicine is not the only new college that wants to influence its medical students into primary care as roughly a dozen other schools have adopted that goal as well.

Primary care positions are often less popular because the position does not generate as much money as specialists and other positions do. Medical students invest so much money and time into becoming doctors that the return might have to be more for these doctors-in-training, which is why programs like this new school, are important in encouraging the field of primary care physicians. Despite the need for more primary care doctors, the school, being so new, has a very limited amount of spots.

"We have over 1,600 applicants, and we will interview 400 for 60 spots," he said.  

Ellison and the dean, Bruce Koeppen looked into several factors that might influence how certain medical students pick career in primary care.

"Turns out that women are more likely to go into primary care than men. Individuals who are coming to medicine as a second career are more likely to go into primary care," the dean noted.

Ellison and Koeppen are looking forward to the first year of medical school.