Burrell Medical College staying true to its mission of more doctors in underserved areas

In July 2013 – 10 years ago this month – George Mychaskiw and John Hummer created the entity that would become Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine (BCOM).

A decade later, BCOM began the 2023-24 academic year with a July 14 white coat ceremony welcoming 200 new medical students to Las Cruces from across the country.

BCOM has graduated 564 new doctors since 2020 and is keeping to its mission of improving health care throughout the region, said Hummer, who is BCOM’s president and chief executive officer.

Of BCOM graduates today, 99% are in residency programs and more than 25 percent complete residencies in “the mission region,” Hummer said, and more than a third of those who leave to practice elsewhere will return.

“We’re very pleased with the quality of our graduates,” Hummer said.

BCOM history

The BCOM story began in December 2012, Hummer said, when Mychaskiw (a doctor of osteopathy who is now a professor at Louisiana State University) contacted then interim-New Mexico State University President Manuel Pacheco about creating a public-private partnership with NMSU to open a medical school in Las Cruces to address the shortage of physicians in the Southwest and the border region and diversity the physician workforce.

A conversation with Bill Allen, then at the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce connected Mychaskiw with Hummer, who had come to Las Cruces in 2000 to become founding CEO at MountainView Regional Medical Center.

In 2013, Hummer made the medical-school pitch to then-NMSU President and former New Mexico Governor Garrey Carruthers, then-NMSU Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff Ben Woods and the late Kevin Boberg, who helped establish Arrowhead Park Early College High School on the NMSU campus and helped launch NMSU’s Arrowhead Center and was its first director and CEO.

Among others, Hummer also shared the concept with Dr. William T. Baker, DO, who has practiced medicine in Las Cruces for more than 40 years, is a member of the BCOM board of directors and was keynote speaker at BCOM’s 2023 graduation.

“Dr. Pacheco indicated, in a briefing after my selection as president, that he had left some correspondence regarding the prospect of locating a medical school on the campus of NMSU,” Carruthers said. “I read the letter from George Mychaskiw, put together an NMSU team to consider the proposal, and we responded positively to George. To this day, I think that decision is one of the best I made on behalf of NMSU and New Mexico. John Hummer and his team have executed their collaborative plan with NMSU flawlessly, offering many benefits to our university, our students, and our region. I am pleased to have played a role.” 

Once an affiliation agreement was signed with NMSU in September 2013, Hummer met with Dan Burrell to begin the fundraising of more than $104 million to build and open the school. The Burrell family put up the first $7.5 million for the medical school and were given naming rights. Burrell joined John Hummer and George Mychaskiw as one of the school’s co-founders.

Burrell was founder and CEO of The Burrell Group, LLC, a holding company that operates companies in a variety of sectors, including education.

Hummer and Mychaskiw met with Rice University in 2015, and following their meeting, Rice became the single largest BCOM shareholder in 2016.

In 2020, BCOM graduated its first cohort of 162 medical students, and received full accreditation from the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation and the U.S. Department of Education. Burrell has obtained candidacy status by the Higher Learning Commission.

“Sometimes I pinch myself,” Hummer said. “There’s so many people that played a part” in getting BCOM open, he said. “Everything came together because of relationships.”

BCOM today

BCOM includes a virtual anatomy laboratory, state-of-the-art simulation center and more than 100 community members who serve as standardized patients at Burrell, realistically portraying patients with a wide range of health issues to help train first- and second-year students.

In addition to the Las Cruces campus, BCOM operates academic centers in El Paso, Tucson, southeast New Mexico, the Four Corners region, Albuquerque and Brevard County, Florida. BCOM students train with more than 850 physician preceptors (supervisors) at hospitals in Las Cruces, El Paso, Albuquerque, Hobbs, Roswell, Carlsbad, Artesia, Lovington, Farmington and Gallup.

Through more than 50 on-campus organizations, BCOM students have contributed nearly 20,000 hours of volunteer service in Las Cruces and other communities since 2021. During the pandemic, BCOM students worked with their faculty and the New Mexico Department of Health to operate one of the first drive-thru Covid testing sites in the Southwest.

BCOM ranks second in the nation for its percentage of underrepresented minority students enrolled in a college of osteopathic medicine.

Students’ stories

“I wanted to study osteopathic medicine because of their holistic approach … how many patients in such a wide variety of specialties can actually use a lot of these manipulations,” second-year BCOM student Kyle Essex he said in a BCOM video.

Essex said a major reason he chose BCOM was a conversation he had with Miley Grandjean, Burrell’s director of academic support services. Essex told Grandjean he wanted to continue to work as a paramedic while attending BCOM, and she told him there was already a student at BCOM who was doing that and arranged a meeting between them.

Essex graduated from State University of New York (SUNY) Cortland with a degree in physical education and a minor in music before coming to BCOM. He worked as a paramedic in New York and continues to do so in Las Cruces.

Essex wants to practice emergency medicine and complete fellowships in emergency medical service and critical care medicine.

“One of the best things you will find at Burrell is the sense of community within each cohort,” said BCOM 2022-23 student doctor of the year Kate Hall. “Burrell does a great job of fostering that sense of community and support among its students.”

“The students I met during the interview cycle were warm, positive and genuinely passionate about serving the underserved of New Mexico and the Borderplex, which resonates with who I am and my mission,” said BCOM student doctor Rebecca Nika Tsai, class of 2026.

The future

BCOM will open a medical school on the Florida Institute of Technology campus in Melbourne, Florida in 2024, Hummer said. With 100 students per class, BCOM Florida will share faculty with BCOM Las Cruces, follow the same curriculum and operate under the same leadership, he said.

Following its strategic plan, BCOM will continue to focus on diversifying its physician workforce and enhancing medical care in underserved areas, Hummer said.

By summer 2026, BCOM expects to develop a health science degree program in partnership with NMSU, he said.

This fall, BCOM will launch its community-based learning mission medicine curriculum, through which students will provide outreach services to underserved areas within Doña Ana County and in affiliation with community health care providers and community agencies.

“Our dean established this new initiative to better ensure that our mission was embedded within our communities and that our students would gain a better understanding of the social determinants of healthcare and actively participate in improving access to care, education, and overall health status,” Hummer said.

“The credit for the success of the founding of BCOM belongs to more than the initial founders,” Hummer said in a history of the college. “It also belongs to the first faculty and staff, the board of trustees, the many supporters for their contributions and most of all the first class of students (Class of 2020).”

Visit burrell.edu.