Mary Washington Health Care Head Talks Medical School, Challenges
The region’s two largest healthcare providers agreed on the healthcare challenges facing our rapidly growing region. Training physicians, technology, and AI will be keys to the solution.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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The two largest healthcare providers in our region have different business models — Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center is a part of HCA, a publicly traded company that is the largest hospital organization in the world; Mary Washington Healthcare is a nonprofit healthcare provider — but their two leaders were in agreement on Wednesday about the challenges facing the region.
Explosive population growth presents an enormous challenge for the greater Fredericksburg region. While population has grown 8.2% in Virginia as a whole since 2000, it’s grown over 55.6% here.
That, coupled with the critical shortage of physicians and other healthcare specialists, has created a problem that is all-too-familiar to people in the region — an increasingly difficult time accessing healthcare.
For MWHC’s new CEO, Dr. Christopher Newman, addressing the challenge presented by population growth is grounded in producing more practitioners. “We want to be part of the solution,” he said.
He highlighted two initiatives — one established, and one in the planning phase — that should help deliver more providers in an array of specialties to the region.
The Graduate Medical Education program is a training ground for recent medical school graduates. The program is set to grow dramatically in the coming years and Newman hopes that many of the graduates will opt to stay in our region after graduation.
The second is a medical school on the MWHC campus that according to Virginia Business could be up and running as early as 2029.
The school would be a partnership between MWHC and the University of Mary Washington.
A new $40 million facility on the MWHC campus is currently under construction and expected to be completed next year. It initially will serve as a training center for students in the Graduate Medical Education program, but it would likely become the home of the medical school once it wins approval to operate.
A second problem raised by Ryan DeWeese, Chief Executive Officer of Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center, is the potential loss of health insurance by up to 400,000 Virginians in the wake of the passage of the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Mary Washington Healthcare provided roughly $72 million in charity care last year. Should the forecasts bear out, MWHC could potentially face a significantly greater challenge serving the uninsured.
Asked by the Advance what plans are underway to prepare for this potential onslaught, Newman referenced the significant loss in funding hospitals face due to the Big, Beautiful Bill — MWHC could lose “tens of millions,” he said — the escalating costs of medical care, and workforce shortages that MWHC and hospitals across the country are now facing.
These pressures are forcing MWHC “to figure out how to do more with less.” His sights are set on technology and potentially Artificial Intelligence to help fuel a different model of healthcare so they can improve medical access for people in the area.
Newman and DeWeese appeared at the Chamber of Commerce’s Regionalism Matters series at Virginia Credit Union Stadium.
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