The University of Houston has won accreditation for its planned medical college, clearing the way for a summer opening of the city’s first new school devoted to the training of doctors in nearly half a century.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education on Wednesday informed UH that it has granted preliminary accreditation to its college of medicine, the last hurdle before UH could start its school focusing on primary care in underserved areas. UH can now begin recruiting and enrolling students toward that mission.

“Today is a historic day for UH, the city of Houston and the state of Texas because we’re building this dream together,” UH President Renu Khator said in a written statement. “Our dedicated faculty and students will work tirelessly, with boots on the ground in clinics across the city, to advance health care delivery and ultimately improve the well-being of our communities.”

By training a generation of doctors well-versed in how to provide health care at a reasonable cost, Khator added, UH will expand the capabilities of serving people and neighborhoods “too often left behind.”

Texas has a shortage of more than 4,800 primary-care doctors, which works out to the nation’s 47th-worst ratio of such doctors per person. Despite recent pushes to increase the pipeline of physicians in Texas’ rural and urban areas, a significant number of counties and communities, many in Harris County, continue to be classified as medically underserved.

The school will be the third in Houston and the sixth in the region, joining Baylor College of Medicine and McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in the nearby Texas Medical Center; UT Medical Branch at Galveston located 55 miles to the south and Texas A&M Medical School 100 miles to the north; and Sam Houston State University, which is set to open a school of osteopathic medicine in Conroe in July.

The last medical school to open in Houston was McGovern, then known as the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, in 1972. The UH medical school will open in July.

UH will break ground this summer on an $80 million medical school building expected to be completed in 2022. It will be built on a 43-acre tract of undeveloped land at the campus’ southeast corner, next to MacGregor Park and the METRO rail station. Until then, an existing university health building will serve as the college’s temporary home.

UH is partnering with HCA Houston Healthcare to train students and residents. The residency program, which began last summer, calls for the creation of 460 residency positions at HCA hospitals by 2025. It will have sponsored more than 100 by this July.

The green light from the LCME, which accredits medical education programs in the United States and Canada, was hailed by Bill McKeon, president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center. UH became a member institution of the TMC in 2009 because of its existing health programs at the time.

“I am thrilled for President Khator and the UH System board of regents as they now officially embark on educating future health care leaders,” said McKeon. “I have no doubt that many future graduates of the UH medical school will make tremendous contributions to the evolving Texas Medical Center.”

Dr. Paul Klotman, president of the Baylor College of Medicine, added: “We look forward to working together (with UH) to address the shortage of primary care physicians.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: Safety-net health clinic to open at University of Houston

The accreditation culminates a decades-old UH dream that only become serious with Khator’s public announcement in 2014 that the pursuit of a medical school would be one of her top priorities. UH regents signed off on the idea in November 2017 and the university got approval from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in 2018. Last year, the Texas legislature provided $20 million in start-up funding.

The LCME accreditation is the first of three stages. After preliminary accreditation, the LCME considers provisional accreditation following a review during the inaugural class’ second year and full accreditation following a review during the school's fourth year of operation.

The preliminary accreditation allows UH to recruit and enroll students, though the application process for the 2020 class is already closed. Students are only accepted through the Texas Medical & Dental Schools Application Service, which will now notify applicants already in the portal about how to add UH to their list of preferred choices. Such applicants’ materials will then be forwarded to UH for review.

Dr. Stephen Spann, founding dean of the UH medical school, said he hopes to have selected its first class by early May. Noting that Dell Medical School at the University of Texas-Austin had 4,000 applicants for its inaugural class, Spann said he anticipates an abundance of strong candidates for UH’s 30 slots. There are roughly 6,000 overall applicants in the Texas portal.

Thanks to an anonymous $3 million gift, the UH students selected will each receive $100,000 four-year scholarships to cover tuition and fees.

Prelimination accreditation is granted by the LCME based on criteria that include a positive report following a visit by an organization team of surveyors, as well as a board determination that the program meets its standards. The determination was made at an LCME meeting this week.

LCME’s program directory has been updated to reflect new UH’s accreditation status, said a spokesman.

Spann has hired 27 full-time faculty so far and is recruiting another 12 to 14 whom he said will be hired before classes start. Eventually, the number is expected to grow to 65 full-time faculty as well as a large number of “voluntary professors” teaching in outpatient and inpatient clinical settings. At full enrollment, the medical school will have 480 students.

UH will expose students to primary-care settings and practice as part of its mission. That includes pairing students with families living in underserved communities throughout the four years of studies and requiring that students participate in a four-week clinical learning experience in rural Texas.

Medical students typically spend their first two years in science classes in the classroom and the last two primarily in clinical settings.

Spann, who got the news about the accreditation by phone Wednesday morning, said he was “delighted” by the call.

“This is the dream becoming reality,” said Spann, a longtime Houston medical professional hired as the school’s planning dean in 2015 and founding dean in 2018. “But now the real work begins because we want to be accountable for improving the overall health and health care of the region.”

todd.ackerman@chron.com