With the health care system swamped by the Affordable Care Act and a physician shortage threatening the future of health care, the medical community has called for more medical schools to produce more doctors specifically, more primary care physicians.

In a few months, Quinnipiac University in Hamden steps up to that challenge by opening the state's first new medical school in nearly a half-century. The Frank H. Netter School of Medicine has progressed in just a few years from conception to welcoming its first class this summer at the university's North Haven campus.

While workers affixed handrails inside the 145,000-square-foot building and finished the landscaping, administrators were finalizing the first class, whittling down about 2,000 applications to the 60 available slots. Within four years, class sizes will expand to 125 with each successive incoming class.

The Association of American Medical Colleges predicts a shortage of more than 90,000 doctors by 2020 about half being primary care doctors. The current aging population of doctors means more physicians will be retiring just as baby boomers need more care.

"The mission of ours is different from both Yale and UConn," said Quinnipiac President John L. Lahey. "They're committed to research and they're committed to the specialties. Our commitment is to primary care."

Made possible with a $100 million investment, Quinnipiac's is the state's third medical school. The UConn School of Medicine opened in 1968 and Yale's was founded in 1813. In addition to alleviating a shortage of doctors, the new medical school fits in with Quinnipiac's ongoing ambition to become a national university with its goal of meeting a need for more primary care physicians.

Nationally, about 20 percent of graduating medical students go into primary care. Quinnipiac's goal is to have 50 percent of its graduates choose primary care.

According to the physician search firm Merritt Hawkins & Associates, orthopedists and cardiologists make more than $500,000 per year, while the average family practitioner makes about $190,000. Nurse practitioners and physicians' assistants make about half that, but with only a third of the time spent in training. Considering the kind of student loan debt that comes with medical school it's four more years after the four years of undergraduate schooling it's easy to understand why primary care can be a tough sell.

That's why Quinnipiac administrators have done what they can to improve the odds of producing more internists than, say, plastic surgeons. It starts with choosing incoming students carefully. Some criteria are obvious a stated interest in going into primary care, for instance.

Anthony "Bud" Ardolino, senior associate dean for academic affairs, said there are indicators on a student's application that hint at certain tendencies. Students with a rural or urban background, are married, or who had non-science majors in college are more likely to go into primary care, he said. Also a students who played on a baseball team have a greater tendency toward primary care than someone who played a typically solo sport, such as tennis.

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A New Breed Of Doctor, From Quinnipiac's New Medical School