Proposed College On Path to Accreditation

Leading a proposed medical college from idea to reality was not a career goal of Fort Smith businessman Kyle Parker.

The law, after all, is his vocation, earning a JD with highest honors from Franklin Pierce Law School in Concord, New Hampshire. He also has experience in startups, private banking and technology.

But any amount of time spent with the man will give a clear indication he is emphatically poised to lead the development of the state’s first school of osteopathic medicine.

Parker, the CEO of the proposed Arkansas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Smith, said his motivation is straightforward: to make a difference.

Osteopathic medicine is a branch of medicine that focuses on the body as a whole rather than a collection of parts, and its presence is becoming essential as concerns mount about a growing shortage of primary-care providers.

Arkansas ranks 48th in the country in physician accessibility, and Oklahoma is 49th, so the benefit of a Fort Smith-based osteopathic medical college is easy to understand.

“It’s going to make a minimum of a $100 million economic impact per annum,” Parker said. “I understand the economics very well. But I measure the impact in human lives. That you can’t put in dollars.”

Making a difference is the same principle that led Parker’s thinking nearly 30 years ago when he conceived an enterprise that would provide low-cost legal research to the “little guy” who couldn’t compete with huge law firms and their unlimited resources.

The success of that venture is undeniable. Loislaw.com Inc., Parker’s Internet legal information company, was formed in 1987 and went public in September 1999. In 2001, Parker sold Loislaw.com to Amsterdam-based world publishing company Wolters Kluwer for more than $100 million.

So when the man says financial gain is not why he accepted an offer to become CEO of such a potentially impactful economic engine for Fort Smith, it’s easy to believe him.

“It’s about trying to make a difference,” he said. “Everybody likes money but that is not my motivation and never has been. It’s helping. And this [medical college] is special. I have been so blessed in my life that I think God demands of me to give back, and I am grateful to do so. Some people have a problem talking about spirituality. I don’t. And I just hope I fulfill what He has asked me to do.”

 

Shifting the Schedule

In February, the Fort Smith Regional Healthcare Foundation board unanimously voted to move ahead with a plan it had been studying for several months — to develop a college of osteopathic medicine.

The college is the first project of the Arkansas Colleges of Health Education, a newly formed higher education institution in Fort Smith, doing business as the Arkansas College of Osteopathic Medicine.

The foundation board committed more than $58 million to the project — Parker said the proposed college has about $74 million in cash behind it right now — and the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority gifted the board 200 acres at Chaffee Crossing as a site to build the college campus.

Ivy Owen, the executive director of the FCRA, said at least two other Fort Smith landowners offered land as a site for the proposed college, and one of those was also for free.

“We knew in order to be competitive we had to match the free offer,” Owen said. “[The ACHE] ultimately decided that the Chaffee land was better-suited for them.”

Parker, the foundation board chairman, was named the college’s top executive in April.

The original plan was to admit the first class of 150 students in the fall of 2017. That schedule has been moved up an entire year, to the fall of 2016.

Parker said the change was due largely to the hiring of Kenneth A. Heiles as the proposed college’s academic dean. Heiles was the No. 2 academic officer at a similar institution in Harrogate, Tennessee — coincidentally the institution where Parker’s oldest son will begin medical school this fall — and has also worked as director of medical education for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences/AHEC in Pine Bluff.

“Ken has gone through this process,” Parker explained. “We have to go through the national accrediting agency to get our national accreditation, and we were able to hire an expert that knows about that process.”

Speeding up the opening date was also helped significantly by an anonymous donation of $14 million in May.

“I was fortunate enough to have a relationship with a family that wanted to know how they could help,” Parker said. “I know it came from spirituality because we go to the same church. I know it was a Christian-based duty of people who have been blessed and wanted to help others.”

 

Road to Acceptance

The proposed osteopathic college in Fort Smith was announced in February, but the road to acceptance officially began three months later.

An application document of about 250 pages was submitted May 30 to the Arkansas Department of Higher Education. Parker said, on July 25, he anticipates the board will provide the school’s proponents with a notice to proceed, a requirement that has to be presented to the national accrediting agency, the American Osteopathic Association’s Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation (COCA).

“The state agency needs to say it is OK to proceed. Then the ADHE relies on the findings of COCA for full accreditation in the state,” he said.

The application document submitted to COCA in early August will be more than 500 pages, Parker said. The next important milestone will be receiving pre-accreditation status, which is anticipated before the end of the year. At that point, the school can actively begin recruiting students.

And medical students are becoming more receptive to osteopathy, as opposed to traditional medical school training.

Currently, there are 30 accredited colleges of osteopathic medicine in the United States, but four of them have opened since 2011.

 

Senior Staff

Besides Parker and Heiles, other senior staff who have been hired are Thomas H. Webb Jr. as chief operating officer and Dennis Bauer as chief financial officer.

Since 2009, Webb has been executive director of the Fort Smith Regional Healthcare Foundation, formed following the $138-million sale of Sparks Health System to Naples, Florida-based Health Management Associates. Webb also worked for three decades at Fort Smith-based poultry production company OK Foods. He was president of the company for 12 years.

Bauer spent more than three decades as a financial officer for Sparks until its sale in 2009. He is now chief financial officer at Fort Smith nonprofit The Degen Foundation, the entity overseeing the Arkansas Colleges of Health Education that will run the proposed osteopathic college.

“I learned a long time ago that you hire people who are better at the task you need executed than you are capable of delivering,” Parker said.

Right now, they are the only four paid employees of the proposed college. Parker said he has received dozens of resumes for 30 additional positions that will be filled in the coming months.

“It’s all about the timing,” he said. “Assistant dean of clinicals and assistant dean of biosciences will be next.”