The Proposed USC Medical School and Innovation Campus

By David Prim & Christian Graves

Recently, the University of South Carolina announced plans to move the School of Medicine from its current location – adjacent to the W.J.B. Dorn Veterans Affairs Medical Center – to a new healthcare campus near Palmetto Health Richland.  This new campus represents several important, if not critical, improvements to the School of Medicine and USC’s biomedical ecosystem.

This project would include four new buildings on the 14-acre property with the potential for two more down the road: a medical school, a life-science facility, a private medical-research office, and a parking garage. In its current configuration, academic and research departments are dispersed between seven buildings at the VA campus, while most clinical departments are several miles away at the Palmetto Health facilities.

One of the most apparent improvements included in the proposal is consolidating the School of Medicine into one location. This consolidation has the obvious benefit of keeping classrooms and clinics in closer physical proximity for students and faculty alike. Furthermore, there are other, less apparent benefits to a consolidated campus. Biomedical researchers, such as those with laboratories at the current campus on Garners Ferry Road, conduct research with the overarching goal of improving the medical field. The first step to conducting effective research is identifying a problem to be solved, and innovators in the field widely acknowledge that practitioners – physicians, nurses, and myriad other healthcare professionals – are often the ones best positioned to identify problems. On the other hand, practitioners generally do not have the training or resources – time, funding, and lab space – to conduct research and solve these problems themselves. As such, building an environment where researchers and clinicians are working shoulder-to-shoulder is an important step in fostering an innovative ecosystem. Doctors and nurses would have direct access to researchers with the capacity to help solve their clinical problems, while researchers would benefit from direct exposure to the most pressing issues facing medical professionals on a daily basis.

These new collaborations have the potential to advance beyond academic research into novel products and companies. In many cases, the problems faced by one doctor, nurse, or hospital are also faced by others across the country and around the world. For example, Cactus LLC, from just down the road in Charleston, SC, was founded on the basis of improving medical waste disposal – an idea formulated by the founder’s direct interactions with practitioners on the front lines of healthcare. As it turns out, Cactus LLC is helping to solve a universal problem and has already spread to over 1,700 locations across the United States as well as other countries. It is doubtful that Cactus LLC was the first to identify this issue; however, it was the first time that the problem was addressed by someone with the resources and abilities to tackle the problem head on.

Cactus LLC is just one local example of this phenomenon. Most physicians do not have the time or desire to invent new products and start companies. However, groups like the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, a national organization with a chapter recently formed in SC, and Carolina Biotech Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by graduate students at USC, aim to connect these professionals with the people and resources capable of taking existing problems, finding solutions, and turning solutions into viable products or businesses. The most important part of this type of entrepreneurial ecosystem is collaboration between people with diverse sets of skills, and the first step in fostering collaboration is putting the right people in a position to collaborate. A consolidated healthcare and life science campus could do just that.

Beyond the improvements that a consolidated location offers for the USC School of Medicine, new facilities represent a significant improvement over the existing location. Undoubtedly, the current School of Medicine sits on a unique and beautiful campus. Unfortunately, that campus is also made up of outdated buildings that were not designed to house a cutting-edge 21^st century medical institution. As mentioned in the original article detailing the University’s plans (published in The State 1/20/16), the university estimates a need for $75 million in improvements to the current campus. While USC (and by proxy the state of South Carolina) would save a significant amount of money improving the current campus, USC would still be left with facilities that don’t stack up to the standards set by MUSC and other top-tier institutions to which USC aspires. As just one example, the constraints of the current facility led to many high tech microscopes and diagnostic tools being housed in the basement of one of the buildings. When the terrible floods came in October 2015, that basement flooded, leading to damage of approximately $2 million worth of equipment. Additionally, while the School of Medicine was founded in part due to a grant from the Department of Veteran Affairs, that $1/year lease is set to expire in 2030, which will lead to the additional expense of yearly rent (est. at $7.5 mil / year) just to stay in subpar facilities.

New facilities will help train the next generation of medical students, help researchers work more productively, and help recruit new talent to USC as well. When top students are taking campus tours and young faculty are searching for new positions, it hurts the University’s chances to have broken windows, asbestos warnings, and labs and offices intermixed haphazardly about a complex labyrinth of buildings and hallways. With funding sources becoming ever tougher to access at the university, state, and federal level, it is wasteful for USC to continue to pour money into upkeep of an outdated medical campus. While maintenance is a reality in any location, the expenses at the current medical campus are exorbitant due to the significant age of the facilities and the legal necessity to operate within historic building codes.

With a new medical campus located in close proximity to the sprawling Palmetto Health facilities in the heart of downtown Columbia, the USC School of Medicine will be situated in a prime position to be successful for years to come. Geographic proximity and new facilities will help foster collaborative efforts between clinicians, students, researchers, and other healthcare professionals. Collaborations have the potential to foster new ideas, products, and companies that will, in turn, bring money back to the university, with the potential to bring a significant return on investment to the initial cost of this project. With these new physical facilities and collaborative relationships, USC will also have a valuable recruiting tool to attract the best and brightest students and faculty, and, as these new students and faculty come to USC, they will bring their own new ideas and talents. As such, this proposal will not only fund a convenient new healthcare campus; the improved location, facilities upgrades, and innovative research environment it will foster has the potential to fund a positive feedback loop that could pay for itself ten-fold in the years to come.

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