The New England Commission of Higher Education confirmed its inclusion of a new regional medical school campus at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington in UMass Chan Medical School’s accreditation.
The partnership with Lahey and the new LEAD@Lahey track will prepare students “to lead and create solutions to future challenges in health care,” according to the report submitted by UMass Chan to the commission.
The track is scheduled to launch in August 2024 with 25 students, and 25 new students per year are projected through year four.
During the first 18 months of the LEAD@Lahey program, students will attend courses on both UMass Chan’s main campus in Worcester and on the UMass Chan-Lahey campus in Burlington.
Terence R. Flotte, MD, the Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor, executive deputy chancellor, provost and dean of the T.H. Chan School of Medicine, has appointed Anne Mosenthal, MD, Lahey Hospital & Medical Center’s chief academic officer, to be the inaugural regional executive dean of UMass Chan-Lahey.
The new regional medical campus builds on the success of UMass Chan’s first regional campus at Baystate Health established in Springfield in 2015, which is home to the Medical School’s Population-based Urban and Rural Community Health (PURCH) track. PURCH follows the core curriculum of the T.H. Chan School of Medicine with a focus on population health, health care disparities and health issues that are specific to urban and rural communities.
In a December letter to Chancellor Michael F. Collins, commission chair Russell C. Carey commended UMass Chan for submitting a “well-organized and comprehensive proposal that details its plans.” The letter highlighted that the initiative stemmed from UMass Chan’s “thorough strategic planning process, and it builds on shared vision to ‘educate future generations of physicians grounded in evidence-based, patient-centered, multispecialty and interprofessional practice, and to meet the diverse needs of [its] communities.’”
The commission will conduct a site visit in spring 2025 to assess implementation of UMass Chan’s Burlington campus. The evaluation will assess success in achieving the enrollment and financial goals set for the initiative; ensuring sufficient faculty and staff to oversee the quality of the initiative; providing adequate resources and student services to support the initiative; and implementing relevant approaches to assess student achievement and success.
Accreditation of an institution of higher education by the commission indicates that it meets or exceeds criteria for the assessment of institutional quality periodically applied through a peer review process.
