A new medical school in Bentonville, Arkansas, has officially welcomed its first class of students.
The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (AWSOM) was founded by Walmart heir and philanthropist Alice Walton in 2021. The school aims to reimagine medical education by leaning on whole health principles. The curriculum includes an emphasis on art, the humanities and bringing empathy back into medicine.
The inaugural class has 48 students, with plans to eventually expand to 96 per year. The program is pending programmatic accreditation by the LCME upon graduation of the first class. Tuition will be waived for the first five cohorts.
Walton founded the school after her own health scare, which forced her to seek care outside the state. “She was able to access great care, but she had to leave the state,” Sharmila Makhija, M.D., M.B.A., founding dean and CEO of AWSOM, told Fierce Healthcare. “She really felt compelled to do something about that.”
With the goal of filling a critical shortage of physicians in America’s heartland, the school is particularly interested in applications from locals. “We do feel that if you come from that background you’re more likely to understand the needs or feel compelled to give back,” Makhija said. About a third of the incoming class have a rural background and are coming from within the state. Another fifth are coming from neighboring states that touch Arkansas.
Arkansas ranked nearly last in last year’s America’s Health Rankings, run by UnitedHealth Foundation, with 59 counties in the state being medically underserved. In rural populations, chronic and preventable diseases are prevalent, and preventive measures could be meaningfully improve outcomes. That’s why the school is focused on whole-person care, Makhija said. It is helped along by the Heartland Whole Health Institute, a nonprofit also founded by Walton, which launched in 2019.
Makhija previously chaired the OBGYN and women’s health department at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Growing up in Alabama as the daughter of Indian immigrants, she saw first-hand the gaps in rural healthcare. During COVID, Makhija saw Montefiore providers lose empathy due to burnout. “It was a disconnect, talking to patients,” she recalled. AWSOM aims to equip future doctors “with their own self-awareness and well-being," she said, "because if you’re not good yourself, how can you outwardly take care of someone else?”
AWSOM claims to be one of the only U.S. med schools to embed the arts longitudinally across all four years of training as a core competency. The 154,000 square-foot building is on the campus of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Training will include museum-based learning and using visual art to teach clinical reasoning. Training also includes techniques like narrative medicine, improv and reflective writing. The campus features elements like a healing garden and outdoor amphitheater to reinforce mindfulness and creativity.
Students will also learn about value-based care, population health, health equity and nutrition. Students will also have early clinical exposure to patients from day one. To encourage a steady pipeline of future physicians to stay practicing in the state, AWSOM wants to build out residency options. To that end, the Alice L. Walton Foundation has teamed up with Mercy Health System, AWSOM’s educational partner, and Cleveland Clinic to build a new outpatient center. The hope is for students to do residencies there, as well as rotations at a local federally qualified health center.
“We know that students that train at a residency tend to stay,” Makhija said. “This is a really logical way of building out the whole pipeline for physicians.”
AWSOM also leaned on the Stanford School of Medicine to design its curriculum. Stanford Medicine’s dean, Lloyd Minor, M.D., is from Arkansas and chairs AWSOM’s board. Through a formal collaboration, Stanford faculty will be teaching some classes for at least six months. There will also be research opportunities at Stanford for AWSOM faculty and students. AWSOM’s full-time faculty were intentionally recruited to focus solely on teaching and mentoring. “We are really invested in making sure that our teachers are really engaged with the students,” Makhija noted.
One of the major benefits of being a new school is being flexible and innovative, Makhija said. Staying modern can become difficult at an established institution due to entrenched bureaucracy. An example of how that flexibility can be harnessed is the ability to incorporate real-world learnings, such as AI. Already, two new med schools have reached out to AWSOM for support in designing their curriculum.
“We do feel very strongly that it shouldn’t be just us. We want to help other schools bring it up to another level,” Makhija said.