WILLIAMSBURG Students working on their medical degrees at Eastern Virginia Medical School can now opt to spend a year earning an accelerated MBA at William and Mary as part of an expanded collaboration between the two schools, officials at both schools announced Friday.

EVMS students entering the program will spend their fourth year completing an intensive 48-credit MBA program at William and Marys Mason School of Business before returning to EVMS to finish their final year of medical school. Acceptance into the program will begin in July of this year. The program will include courses taken at both the Williamsburg main campus and the Flex MBA program at the William and Mary Peninsula campus in Newport News. The course load includes 16.5 credits between August and December and 17 credits between January and May.

The new dual-degree program provides medical students at EVMS an important opportunity to broaden their understanding of the complex health care environment they are entering and to expand their skill set beyond the clinical domain, C. Donald Combs, vice president of EVMS and dean of the EVMS School of Health Professions, said in a statement. Both of these factors should make them more competitive, both in terms of their applications to residencies and their ultimate recruitment into practice settings.

Deborah Hewitt, assistant dean for MBA programs at the Mason School, said in a statement that doctors are increasingly asked to take on other roles beyond just patient care. Many, she said, end up pursuing professional options that require high levels of business acumen and management competence.

Doctors now manage all kinds of things, she said in a statement. It could range from a rehabilitation center, to a home for the aging, to medical device manufacturing. Its much broader than managing a practice.

According to the American College of Physician Executives, MD/MBA programs are a growing trend, and William and Mary and EVMS are in good company. Elsewhere in the country, Harvards medical and business schools launched a dual MD/MBA program in 2005. University of Pennsylvania and University of California-Irvine have similar programs, too.

Also, as part of the expanded collaboration, William and Mary students hoping to study at EVMS can now earn early assurance admission to the medical schools physicial assistant masters program. Previously, a separate agreement between the two schools which had been in place for about 20 years covered only early assurance admission into the EVMS medical doctor program.

In an interview with the Gazette, economics professor Jennifer Mellor, who also serves as director of William and Marys Schroeder Center for Health Policy and liaison to EVMS, said there is a growing need for physician assistants, with two factors affecting that growth. The Hampton Roads area, much like the rest of the country, is seeing an increase in the size of the elderly population, and the Affordable Care Act has expanded access to health care for many more people, thus increasing demand for health care professionals.

There is, more broadly, a change in health care delivery worldwide, Mellor said. Were seeing an expanded role for non-physician practitioners in the health care sector. More and more of our students are looking for ways to be involved in direct patient care but not as a medical doctor. This kind of program, this kind of training, would allow them options to do that.

William and Mary sudents would apply during their junior year. They must take a set of prerequisites while still an undergraduate, maintain good grades, and complete a certain number of hours of clinical contact with patients in order to fulfill that promise of admission.

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W&M, EVMS announce business master's program for medical students