Arizona State University taps HonorHealth as medical school partner
Arizona State University has selected HonorHealth as the primary clinical affiliate for ASU’s School of Medicine and Advanced Medical Engineering. This clinical affiliation means that ASU students will get hands-on experience within HonorHealth’s hospitals and other health facilities.
The students will graduate with a medical degree and master of science in medical engineering.
As part of its accreditation process before opening, ASU needs an established clinical rotation partner. The first class of approximately 35 students is expected to begin in the 2026-27 academic year at a downtown Phoenix campus. The exact location has not yet been identified.Last year, when ASU began searching for a clinical rotation partner, HonorHealth was getting ready to launch a request for proposals nationwide to find an academic partner for its own graduate medical education program, said Dr. John Neil, executive vice president of HonorHealth.It just so happened that Neil was introduced to Dr. Sherine Gabriel, executive vice president of ASU Health, through Tom Sadvary, the former CEO of HonorHealth.Finding the right partner is much like finding a spouse, said ASU President Michael Crow.
ASU, HonorHealth find common ground
Once the leadership teams at HonorHeatth and ASU began talking, they found common ground in their synergy and culture, Gabriel said.”It just moved forward from there,” she said.Todd LaPorte, who took over as CEO of HonorHealth when Sadvary retired in 2017, has been busy growing the Scottsdale-based nonprofit health system across metro Phoenix.Most recently, HonorHealth agreed to take over Dallas-based Steward Health Care’s four hospitals and some 15 outpatient medical practices across Arizona as Steward works through its bankruptcy case.Details are still being worked out as to which HonorHealth facilities will take the brunt of clinical rotations.HonorHealth already has 15 graduate medical education programs for residency and fellowship programs, said Neil.
“We do intend to identify two campuses as primary learning locations,” he said.ASU is operating the largest engineering school in the U.S., said Crow. ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering has attracted a record 33,000 students for the current fall semester.He added that the medical students don’t have to have an engineering background.The new medical school will attract a solution-focused innovative student — someone who isn’t afraid to challenge the usual way things have been done in medicine and is eager to leran and develop skills to help them do all those things, Gabriel said.”We’re training doctors with a different mindset, a different approach and a different set of tools that will help solve problems in ways that some of us trained awhile ago hadn’t considered,” she said. “Humanism is a core of our curriculum.”
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