Homegrown Health Care

Keeping it local

“If we can keep them here for seven to 12 years of training, there’s a good chance they’ll put down roots and take care of the people here.””

John Hummer, President and co-founder, Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine

In a desert city better known for chile fields and long sunsets, a different kind of institution began to take shape in the mid-2010s, one built not on tradition, but on need.

The idea behind Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine didn’t begin with bricks or blueprints. It began with a question that had lingered across southern New Mexico for years:

Who will take care of us?

For decades, the region faced a quiet but persistent shortage of physicians, particularly in rural and underserved communities stretching across southern New Mexico and into West Texas. Recruiting doctors from elsewhere proved difficult. Retaining them proved even harder. Over time, a simple idea began to take hold among local leaders:

If you can’t bring them in, you have to grow them here.

That belief found a home through a partnership with New Mexico State University, where land, infrastructure and community support created the foundation for something ambitious — a private, independent medical school rooted in osteopathic medicine, a discipline built around whole-person care and a strong emphasis on primary care.

For John Hummer, the idea wasn’t abstract. It was personal.

He had been in Las Cruces long enough to see the need up close.

Hummer arrived in 2000, recruited from Las Vegas, Nevada, to help open what would become MountainView Regional Medical Center. He moved with his wife and two young sons, expecting, at least at first, that it might be another stop along the way.

Instead, it became something else.

“We came to the community, and we loved the opportunity,” Hummer said. “We thought we’d been moving all over the country, but we fell in love with this place and decided we were tired of moving. We put a stake in the ground.”

Even after stepping away from hospital leadership, he remained tied to health care projects in the region. So, when the possibility of a new medical school surfaced in 2013, it felt less like a new venture and more like a continuation of a long-standing challenge.

“This potential opportunity came up,” he said. “And it fit exactly what the community needed.”

Burrell College officially opened its doors in 2016, welcoming its first class into a program that was, in many ways, still defining itself.

There were no decades-old traditions to lean on. No alumni network stretching back generations. What it had instead was urgency and a mission shaped years earlier during its planning stages.

“At its core, the mission was to recruit, develop, educate and train a diverse group of individuals that represent the fabric of society,” Hummer said. “And that they would go back into medically underserved communities and increase access to care.”

That mission would shape everything that followed.

Students arrived from across the country, but many shared a common goal: to practice in communities like the ones where they were training. The curriculum leaned into that reality, emphasizing early clinical exposure and partnerships with hospitals and clinics throughout the region.

The strategy was deliberate.

“We know that students who go to medical school and stay in the area for residency — 60 to 70 percent of them will stay within about a 75-mile radius,” Hummer said. “If we can keep them here for seven to 12 years of training, there’s a good chance they’ll put down roots and take care of the people here.”

From the beginning, the college positioned itself as more than a classroom.

Its leadership encouraged students to move beyond lectures and labs, into health fairs, clinics and neighborhoods—places where medicine becomes less about theory and more about connection. The goal wasn’t just to train physicians, but to immerse them in the communities they might one day serve.

That approach extended into its relationship with New Mexico State University, a partnership that helped anchor the college in Las Cruces.

Students live, study and move through the same spaces as the broader university community, with access to campus housing, recreation and student life. The college itself sits within NMSU’s research park, creating both a physical and academic connection between the two institutions.

It’s a structure that helps ease students into the demands of medical education while keeping them rooted in the region.

Building something new, however, comes with its challenges.

Establishing clinical rotations required forging partnerships across a wide geographic footprint, spanning New Mexico, southern Arizona and West Texas. Each connection had to be built, maintained and aligned with the school’s broader mission.

At the same time, the need for physicians in the region wasn’t standing still.

“There has been an exodus of retirement among physicians here,” said William Pieratt. “COVID burned out a lot of people, and the malpractice climate after 2021 made it extremely difficult to recruit new physicians into the state.”

The result has been a system under strain with fewer providers, increasing demand and a workforce that, in some cases, is aging out faster than it can be replaced.

Against that backdrop, Burrell College’s mission has taken on added weight.

Over time, the college has begun to show what that mission can look like in practice. Its first class graduated in 2020. By 2023, the earliest graduates had completed primary care residencies and begun stepping into practice — some in the very communities where they trained.

“A lot of them have gone on to specialties,” Hummer said. “Now we’re starting to put pins in the map.”

Each of those placements represents more than a career milestone. It marks a shift, however small, in the region’s ability to care for itself.

Graduation ceremonies have taken on a different meaning in Las Cruces — not just the end of a program, but the beginning of something the community has long needed: locally trained doctors entering the workforce, some choosing to stay.

The college itself continues to evolve.

Its regional footprint now stretches beyond New Mexico into Arizona and Texas, with a second campus in Florida launched in 2024 through a partnership with Florida Tech. Research opportunities, many tied to its presence in NMSU’s research park, continue to expand, offering students additional pathways into academic and clinical work.

Through it all, the core idea remains unchanged.

“We’re one team, one family, and it’s our diversity that gives us strength,” Hummer said.

Burrell College is still a young institution. It doesn’t yet have the long history or deep alumni network of older medical schools.

What it does have is momentum—and a clearly defined purpose. Each incoming class adds to it. Each graduate carries it forward.

And each year, the answer to that original question becomes a little more tangible.

Who will take care of us?

In Las Cruces, the answer is starting to take shape — not from somewhere else, but from within.

It might just come from here.

Faces & Places 2026 is the inaugural edition of our new lifestyle magazine. Combined with the fall edition, titled Life is Good in Las Cruces, it is filled with feature content about the people, places, and events that make southern New Mexico special.