Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine ranks the University of Kansas School of Medicine in the nation's top five for fulfilling the "social mission" of training doctors to serve the community.

The study, by George Washington University researchers, ranked the nation's 141 medical schools based on the percentage of doctors each trained for primary care, how many graduates worked in underserved areas and how many were minorities.

The study tracked 6,000 medical students who graduated between 1999 and 2001 – the most recent group to have finished college, hospital residencies and other obligations, such as working in the National Health Service Corps to pay off student loans.

“Both the state of Kansas and the country are experiencing tremendous shortages of primary care physicians, and in particular, physicians who are willing to practice in rural and underserved areas,” Dr. Barbara Atkinson, executive vice chancellor of the KU Medical Center, said in a prepared statement. “We are very proud that our faculty and programs are geared toward educating medical students who will serve the community, especially since evidence increasingly shows that access to primary care is associated with improved quality of care and decreased medical costs.”

The top three "social mission" schools, according to the study, were historically black colleges with medical schools, including Morehouse College in Georgia, Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, and Howard University in Washington, D.C. The fourth ranked school was at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, which, like KU, is a public university.

Among the lowest ranked schools were some of the nation's most prestigious and best funded research institutions including Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Duke and Columbia. Texas A&M's school of medicine also fell in the bottom 20 schools.

The study's authors concluded that, "the level of (National Institutes of Health) support that medical schools received was inversely associated with their output of primary care physicians and physicians practicing in underserved areas. High levels of research funding clearly indicate an institutional commitment to research and probably indicate missions that value technical medicine and specialization rather than training in primary care and practice in underserved areas."

KU School of Medicine, since at least 2005, has been increasing its share of NIH funding. In 2008, it ranked 65th among the nation's medical schools for NIH grant awards.

U.S. News & World Report, which does its own rankings of the nation's graduate schools, this year ranked KU's medical school 53rd for primary care and 71st for research.