Kaiser Permanente announced Thursday that it will build its new medical school in downtown Pasadena.

The nonprofit managed health care giant will tear down a Kaiser office building near the Paseo Colorado shopping mall next year to make way for the medical school, says Dr. Edward Ellison, executive medical director of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, who is helping oversee the project.

"We think it's a great location in the community, proximate to affordable housing, public transit and major freeways," Ellison says. "And Pasadena is such a livable city. It's culturally and economically diverse."

The new school, slated to open in 2019, will also be within a few miles of other major Kaiser facilities,"where much of the students' education will take place," he says.

It's anticipated that some of the 48 students who will make up the med school's first class of young doctors will use it as a springboard to a career as a Kaiser physician, says Ellison. But others, he predicts, will choose to practice elsewhere.

"We're not intending that the students that we train remain exclusively with us," he says. "It's really designed to create physicians who are able and ready to practice in a new environment of the future."

Key to achieving that will be teaching students how to deal with different cultures, which, Ellison says, will give the new doctors the ability to help all of their patients make better health and lifestyle choices.

"The most powerful thing we can do to improve health outcomes in this country and ... also lower costs would be to impact behaviors," Ellison says. "The right behaviors can lower our risk of disease and improve our outcomes."

In addition to teaching students to work as part of a collaborative team, Ellison says, the med school plans to get them into the field earlier by immediately training them as emergency medicine technicians, "so that they have an understanding of clinical medicine and how to react in different situations."

When asked how much it will cost to build the school, Kaiser spokeswoman Socorro Serrano says the company is in the process of figuring that out.

Kaiser leaders "are in the very early stages of determining core building design requirements to support the school's needs," she says. "We anticipate having a much clearer picture by year's end."

Serrano also notes that the school "will require a long-term, sizable investment subsidy," adding that "the level of investment required to establish the school will be based on a number of future decisions," such as whether to increase the size of the student body and whether to create additional "physical or virtual 'campuses'" at other Kaiser locations.