Drexel’s network of medical school campuses outside of Philly is advancing a nationwide trend

Alexis Price-Moyer’s heart skipped when Drexel University first announced plans in 2018 to open a medical school campus in West Reading.

The Air Force veteran and Reading native had thought about becoming a doctor since her father died of cancer when she was just 9. Now in her mid-20s and living at home to help her mother pay bills, she never expected her dream could be attained without leaving her hometown.

“When I was little, having an MD was something so beyond the limits of my brain capacity, because it wasn’t around,” she said. “West Reading didn’t have a medical school.”

Price-Moyer became one of the first 40 students enrolled at Drexel’s Tower Health Regional Campus in West Reading when it opened in 2021. The satellite site offers a full, four-year medical school curriculum, where students take the same classes as their counterparts at Drexel’s West Philadelphia campus, then spend two years in clinical rotations at Tower Health’s Reading Hospital.

Drexel’s campus in West Reading is part of a growing trend among medical schools across the country. About 60 medical schools that grant MD degrees — more than a third of such schools — now operate some kind of regional campus.

About 22% of those schools are located in the Northeast U.S., said Jonathan Jaffery, the chief health care officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges. Philadelphia’s Temple University also operates a four-year regional medical campus with St. Luke’s University Health System in Bethlehem. And the trend is not limited to MD-granting schools: the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, which grants DO degrees, has two campuses in Georgia.

“Drexel’s approach is consistent with a trend of building broader connections” that help to expose medical students to a wider range of patients and medical practices, said Wei Du, the senior vice president for academic affairs at Tower Health.

Crossing the street in downtown West Reading between clinical rotations, Price-Moyer sees herself as the role model that she never had growing up.

“Now, here we are in the flesh: the med students in their white coats walking down Penn Avenue to the medical school. It’s something that school-aged kids can achieve because now they see it,” Price-Moyer said.

The boom in regional medical school campuses started around 2010, in part because a growing number of medical students nationwide needed places to do clinical rotations. These take place in a medical student’s third and fourth years in school and allow students to gain firsthand experience in a wide swath of medical specialties before they’re placed in residencies after graduating.

“We’re creating more doctors, but we don’t have all the clinical opportunities for them to train,” AAMC’s Jaffery said.

Drexel is among the schools looking to regional campuses to fill gaps left when teaching hospitals closed, leaving schools without their traditional training partners. Drexel had been planning to open its West Reading campus long before the 2019 closure of Hahnemann University Hospital, the school’s longtime teaching hospital in Center City Philadelphia. But Hahnemann’s closure highlighted the importance of a “distributed model” of medical education, school officials say.

“With the closure of Hahnemann, we turned around and looked at the opportunity we have here — of educating the medical student with a core, defined curriculum in the classroom, that then cascades out to different sites,” said Cecilia Smith, the associate dean at Drexel’s Tower Health Regional Campus in West Reading.

Drexel also operates clinical rotation programs at five other sites, including one on the opposite side of the country in California’s San Francisco Bay Area in partnership with Kaiser Permanente-Bay Area.

Some of those sites, including Kaiser and another at Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh, were hosting students even before Drexel created a four-year campus in West Reading.

The school’s campuses generally host two-year clinical rotation programs, not a full four-year program like West Reading. Medical students will spend their first two years at the Philadelphia campus, then can opt to leave the city for their rotations and relocate to another regional medical campus.

This fall, Drexel is set to open another two-year clinical rotation program at Bayhealth Medical Center in Delaware. The Philadelphia school will also start sending students to do their clinical rotations at AtlantiCare facilities in South Jersey.

Drexel’s array of clinical rotation sites allows students more choices and variety in their training, school officials and students say.

At Drexel’s California campus, administrators see the model as an opportunity for a well-rounded education.

“Your experiences really help out when you’re a medical student deciding which field you want to go in — you want to then have more hands-on experiences,” said Seema Sidhu, the regional associate dean at Drexel’s Kaiser Permanente campus. “Not every medical school has that ability to give them this wide range of specialized experience.”

Students benefit from having a home base during their medical rotations, said James Reilly, the regional associate dean at Drexel’s Allegheny Health campus. Allegheny Health had long hosted Drexel students on specific clinical rotations, and expanded the program in 2020 to allow students to spend their entire third and fourth years of medical school in Pittsburgh.

“In the past, many of our students were really coming here for a few specific rotations, staying in Pittsburgh for two or three months and moving on,” he said. “When folks are moving from hospital to hospital, they have to learn not just a new clinical specialty, but a new place — the rules of how things work in a given hospital or health system.”

“Here, they only have to learn those things once,” he said. “And then they get to know us.”

Opening regional campuses, especially a four-year campus, also brings challenges, especially when it comes to life outside the classroom, students say. Continuity can be a struggle, and smaller campuses cannot always easily replicate academic center-based resources like research laboratories.

Josette Graves was among the Drexel medical students who were unsure about moving to Reading. Graves had gotten her master’s degree at Drexel’s Philadelphia campus. She was offered a partial scholarship to attend classes in Reading and decided to visit to check it out.

“I was already living in Philly, and I thought it would make more sense if I stayed there,” Graves said. “I was pleased to find there were definitely things to do [in Reading] — and the small class size fit in with my personality. I have not regretted it once.”

Price-Moyer said her classmates in the first class to enter the West Reading campus were pleased with their classroom experiences, but they had to work to establish the same extracurricular and research opportunities that their counterparts had at the much-larger West Philadelphia campus.

Students initially didn’t have as many leadership opportunities in affinity groups, and couldn’t attend panels and discussions held hours away at the Philadelphia campus. Price-Moyer said school officials have worked with students to close those gaps.

But the students have relished the opportunity to work closely with community health organizations in West Reading.

Graves, for instance, interned at a local substance use disorder clinic: “It really showed me the ways in which the community can support individuals with substance use disorder — and helped me deconstruct the stigma of addiction,” she said.

Price-Moyer volunteered at a local program to introduce elementary school girls to STEM topics.

Having grown up in the area, Price-Moyer often runs into former high school classmates on her clinical rotations at Reading Hospital. “I walk through the hospital and see people I graduated with working as nurses or surgical techs,” she said.

“And you’re treating the population — these are my people, I grew up in this area, and I was born at this hospital,” she said. “It’s really a full circle moment.”