Virginia’s secretary of Health and Human Resources will be in Roanoke next week to talk about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Bill Hazel is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 4,   at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.

His talk will focus on how Virginians will be affected by the Affordable Care Act, a federal overhaul of the health care system that will require most U.S. citizens to have health insurance while expanding Medicaid and setting up exchanges through which the uninsured can purchase coverage.

Presented by Project Access of the Roanoke Valley, Hazel’s talk will be in the school’s main auditorium. A reception will be held before the speech at 6:15 p.m. in the foyer.

Admission is free, but space is limited. Those interested in attending are asked to RSVP to rvam@rvam.org by Friday, Feb. 1.

The Delta Dental of Virginia Foundation has awarded more than $1.1 million to 36 organizations as part of a new grant program to promote oral health.

Created by an initial $2.5 million donation from Delta Dental of Virginia, a provider of dental insurance, the grants are intended to aid groups statewide that provide oral health care, education and research.

This year’s awards include $250,000 to the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine  to create an endowment for an oral health curriculum.  The school will receive a total of $1 million over the next four years. The money will be used to incorporate oral health training throughout the school’s classes, as well as to support clinical rotations, service learning projects and research scholarships.

Other regional organizations receiving grants this year include: Boys & Girls Clubs of Southwest Virginia, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Blue Ridge, the Bradley Free Clinic, CHIP of Roanoke Valley, the Council of Community Services, the Craig County Rural Health Care Corp., Health Focus of Southwest Virginia, the Roanoke Rescue Mission and the Science Museum of Western Virginia.

Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine Class of 2016 (Photo courtesy of Virginia Tech Carilion)

Applications to the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine increased nearly 19 percent last year over the previous year, as the Roanoke school continues to grow its reputation.

Fewer than 2 percent of the 3,253 people who sought one of the 42 spots in the medical school’s third class were admitted. In its previous two years the school received applications from 2,743 and 1,654 interested candidates.

“I couldn’t be more pleased,” said Dr. Cynda Johnson, the school’s dean. Read more »

A development director has been hired to lead fundraising efforts at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute.

Elizabeth McBride will take on the role of planning and managing all fundraising for the new school and institute. The private nonprofit school, which opened in 2010, is a partnership between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic, while the research institute is an entity of Virginia Tech.

To date, fundraising for VTC has been handled by the Virginia Tech Foundation. Money raised will still be managed by the foundation, however, McBride is employed by Virginia Tech.

Most recently, McBride served as senior development manager for the Memorial Health Foundation in Savannah, Ga., where she managed a $15.75-million capital campaign to support a research facility, according to the news release.

Photo by Kyle Green / The Roanoke Times

Forty percent of the second class at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine are women, up from 29 percent in the inaugural class.

Now that the second class of students at Roanoke’s new medical school are enrolled, the school has revised the information it released in June about those attending. Read more »

Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Photo by Kyle Green / The Roanoke Times

The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine has selected its second class of students, with 41 percent hailing from Virginia.

Currently the school has 43 active acceptances for enrollment. Thirteen of the students have undergraduate degrees from Virginia universities, including Virginia Tech, Washington & Lee, the University of Virginia, James Madison University and William & Mary.

School officials offered the first glimpse of the class Wednesday at a reception for community members who participated in the interviewing process for the applicants. The class make up is still considered a forecast, until classes begin in August.

Much of the information about the newest class mirrors the data provided on the inaugural class of 42 students a year ago. Like last year, a handful of  students have experience conducting original experience. This year eight student fit that description. With the school’s stated focus on medical research the goal has been to attract students who understand the value research has in clinical practice.

With a 40 percent to 60 percent female to male ratio, the second class includes more females than the inaugural class. Last year, the school’s dean said that she was interested in focusing recruitment efforts on attracting top-notch female candidates.

Some of the other stats include:

• Scores for the Medical College Admissions Test for accepted students range from 30 to 40.
• Eight students have graduate level degrees.
• There were 2,763 applicants, of which 239 were invited to Roanoke for an interview.

In cased you missed it, I had two stories publish this weekend about medical students in the area.

The first was about the number of graduates from the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine who enter the military.  This year 27 of the 153 graduates who make up the fifth class of the Blacksburg medical school will join the Air Force, Army or Navy.

That represents about 18 percent of the current graduating class have made the commitment. Next year, 22 percent of that graduating class have chosen military service. Among those in the class of 2014, 32 percent have decided to enter the military.

The second story, which ran Sunday, is about the research being done by students at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.

Classes resume in mid-July, but for now, the 42 students who make up the inaugural class of Roanoke’s new medical school are busy with the required research component of their education.

Both these stories illustrate just a small part of larger missions that are behind each school. At VCOM the mission is one of service, to train doctors to work in medically underserved areas. Military service fits that visions of working in areas where many others don’t.

At VTC the research component of the curriculum, mirrors a larger stimulus effort to make biomedical research, education and clinical patient care the driving forces for the region’s economy.

About nine months after opening, the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute will open its doors to the public Saturday for tours and a ribbon cutting.

The event is being billed as a grand opening and will feature the two men responsible for conceiving and developing the medical school and companion research institute — Virginia Tech President Charles Steger and outgoing Carilion Clinic CEO Dr. Ed Murphy.

Additionally, Dr. Darrell G. Kirch, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, will speak. Kirch’s association represents all accredited allopathic medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. Roanoke’s medical school is among several new schools to seek accreditation from the AAMC recently as the country seeks to address physician shortages.

Other speakers at the event include, Dr. Richard D. Krugman, vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver, and dean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Dr. Robert C. Malenka, the Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Neuroscience is one of the areas of focus for the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.

The day’s events kick off at 9:30. Here is the rest of the schedule:

10:30 a.m.: Kirch speaks

11:10 a.m.: Krugman speaks

11:50 a.m.: Malenka speak

12:30 to 2 p.m.: Tours are give

In case you missed it in Sunday’s story about growth in Lynchburg, plans for yet another medical school in the area are being formed. (If you haven’t read the entire story, it’s worth taking the time. I’m just focusing on one sentence in a story that is filled with telling facts about the region.)

This latest proposed school would come with ties to Liberty University.

In talking about Liberty’s focus on growing its student population and programs, Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. said that the next step will be an expansion of the existing nursing and health sciences programs with the goal of opening an osteopathic medical school.

So far two new medical schools in the region have already opened in less than a decade. It also comes as other areas of health care education have also grown, including at Radford University and the Jefferson College of Health Sciences.

The Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine in Blacksburg opened its doors to students in 2003 and graduated its first class in 2007.

VCOM has a mission to train community-focused physicians who want to practice in rural and medically underserved areas. Specifically the school is trying to address the shortage of primary care doctors in the Appalachian Regions of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The school is already expanding. Last year, VCOM founded the Carolinas Campus in Spartanburg, SC and plans to have students studying there starting this fall.

Then, in August, the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine welcomed its charter class. The school, which was formed by a private-public partnership between Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech, is an allopathic school aimed at training physicians who also have an interest in medical research.

A banner sign went up across Campbell Avenue yesterday morning welcoming applicants of Roanoke’s Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.

The prospective students are here today for the school’s fifth round of interviews. I’m told 30 students are interviewing today using the same process that was put in place last year when VTC was selecting its inaugural class.

A final interview date is set for March 5, with all the offers for a spot in the school’s second class made by the end of March.

You can read more about the interview process, which is adapted from a Canadian medical school, in a story I wrote last year. School official likened the interview day to a speed-dating set-up.