By Encarnacion Pyle

The Columbus Dispatch Tuesday June 12, 2012 6:58 AM

People who want to attend medical school in the Cleveland area soon will have another choice.

Ohio University and the Cleveland Clinic announced yesterday that they are teaming up to open a $49.1 million medical-college campus in the Cleveland suburb of Warrensville Heights to fill a growing need for primary-care doctors in northeastern Ohio.

The extension campus will be developed in a building of the Cleveland Clinics South Pointe Hospital, a 179-bed, acute-care community teaching hospital that has served the citys southeastern suburbs since 1957. Ohio University and the Cleveland Clinic have worked together to train physicians for the past 35 years, and this agreement will build upon that relationship, officials said.

Together, we are striving to be the best at what we do, and we think this will help both of us do just that, OU President Roderick J. McDavis said.

The campus is expected to open with 32 students in July 2015.

Instead of having to take their first two years in Athens, students will be able to complete all four years of their medical education in northeastern Ohio, said Dr. Jack Brose, dean of the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.

It makes sense for the university to expand into northeastern Ohio because more than a quarter of its medical-school applicants come from the Cleveland area, Brose said. About 80percent of the schools graduates practicing primary care in the area also are trained there.

OU is working on a similar, $24 million medical college campus in Dublin with OhioHealth.

More:
OU to open med-school branch near Cleveland