By Darryl Fears,Washington Post Staff WriterGraduates of medical schools at historically black universities such as Howard and Morehouse are the most likely to practice the kind of medicine especially needed under the health-care overhaulthan graduates of elite medical schools at universities such as John Hopkins, Northwestern and Vanderbilt in the Annals of Internal Medicine ranked medical schools based on the communities where their graduates worked and whether those doctors practiced primary care. The Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Howard University College of Medicine in the District and Meharry Medical College in Nashville ranked as the top three, in that order.
By the study's "social mission" criteria, other well-known medical schools ranked far lower. Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville was last among the 141 ranked schools and Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago was 139th. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore ranked 122nd.
The United States faces a shortage of up to 100,000 primary-care doctors in 2020, six years after the health-care overhaul fully kicks in with more than 35 million newly insured Americans. Yet elite medical schools place a stronger focus on specialized medicine and research, the study said. They also lag in recruiting underrepresented minorities -- Latinos, Native Americans and African Americans -- who tend to fill the openings created by the shortage.
"It's no surprise," said Eve Higginbotham, a senior vice president and dean of health sciences at Howard University. "We've known for a long time that minority students end up working in underserved areas four to five times more than majority students." Read the full story here.
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