In many parts of rural Missouri, a doctor’s office can be hours away, and a growing number of regions have no hospital at all. These healthcare gaps aren’t just inconvenient; they’re dangerous. Whether it’s chronic disease, childbirth or emergency care, rural residents face worse health outcomes simply because there aren’t enough physicians nearby. UMKC is working to change that.
The new, $14.5 million education building on UMKC School of Medicine’s St. Joseph Campus, unveiled in August 2025, represents the university’s major investment in expanding and supporting rural healthcare.
“Almost any disease you can list has a higher prevalence and a worse outcome in a rural area,” said Mike Wacker, Ph.D., senior associate dean for rural and medical pathway programs at the School of Medicine. “There just aren’t as many physicians, or healthcare facilities, for people to go to.”
According to the American Medical Association, 136 rural hospitals closed between 2010 and 2021, and about 65% of rural areas have a shortage of primary care physicians. To address this rural healthcare shortage, the School of Medicine has created opportunities to guide future physicians toward serving rural communities by establishing a premedical school program, a satellite education site and a rural residency program. All are aimed at preparing students for a career in rural medicine while immersing them in rural settings.
The School of Medicine opened the St. Joseph Campus in 2021, with the first cohort of 14 students graduating last December and participating in the first Match Day for the campus this March. In 2022, the St. Joseph Campus launched its Rural Pathway Program, designed to offer guidance, clinical exposure and academic support to rural-dedicated students preparing for medical school. And to round out the pipeline, UMKC is now in its inaugural year of a 1+2 Maryville Rural Track Program for residents interested in rural practice after their residency.
“UMKC has spent the past decade formulating a wholehearted commitment to addressing rural care,” said Dean Alexander Norbash (B.A. ’85/M.D. ’86).
A University-Wide Approach to Rural Health
Rural healthcare expansion is a collaborative effort at the university. The School of Pharmacy paved the way, adding rural program locations in Columbia 20 years ago and Springfield 10 years ago.
“Our satellite campuses provide access to high quality pharmacy education for those that otherwise wouldn't be able to move to Kansas City,” said School of Pharmacy Dean Russell Melchert, Ph.D.
Southwest Missouri has already seen dramatic improvements in pharmaceutical shortages in the area thanks to the School of Pharmacy’s presence in Springfield.
“We've graduated 206 pharmacists through that expansion and nearly 80% of them are practicing pharmacy in Missouri, and of those, almost 64% are practicing in southwest Missouri,” Melchert said. “So, the impact of our expansion has been tremendous.”
The UMKC School of Dentistry also recently announced a proposal to build a rural satellite campus at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, adding to its efforts already in place with over a dozen rural rotation sites throughout Kansas and Missouri available to fourth-year dentistry students.
“The students always value this opportunity,” said School of Dentistry Dean Paul Luepke, DDS, M.S., FACD. “They get to work in maybe a different population than they're accustomed to. And that's the idea, getting them used to this so that they can envision themselves being in that kind of a community.”
The School of Medicine also recently expanded its physician assistant program to a second location — in Columbia, Missouri — this January, bringing another healthcare degree option to students in mid-Missouri.
Building a Rural Pipeline: Rural Pathway Program
The new Rural Pathway Program, led by Kathleen Spears, Ph.D., the school’s associate dean for student success, is a year-long program supporting about 10 participants annually. The initiative is comprised of undergraduate students and post-bac professionals from rural areas, primarily in Missouri, who hope to apply to medical school and return to their communities to practice.
“The pathway program is designed to find those people who have that passion and give them the support they need to be successful in healthcare,” Spears said.
According to Spears, students from rural areas are more likely to understand the unique needs of those communities and return to serve them after medical school.
“You have to be a part of the community to understand what's going to happen when certain decisions are made,” said Andrew Sass (Pharm.D. ’15), a second-year M.D. student at the St. Joseph campus who entered UMKC as a result of participating in the Rural Pathway Program. “Since you are boots on the ground, you understand what's going to happen to your patients, and why they need to be advocated for.”
Additionally, the program helps students overcome access barriers, like a lack of local hospitals for shadowing physicians.
“If your nearest hospital is 50 miles away, how are you going to shadow?” Wacker said.
Pathway participants get hands-on clinical experience from day one, nightshift shadowing, monthly seminars and peer mentors from the St. Joseph Campus. Topics range from community leadership and MCAT prep to financial aid education.
Despite having nearly a decade of healthcare experience from his pharmacy career, Sass was nervous about making the transition to medical school, but felt like UMKC provided the resources he needed.
“If the Rural Pathway Program wasn't here, or UMKC didn't put the medical school in St. Joseph, I wouldn't be able to do this,” Sass said.
Similarly, Mikalah Brock, another program graduate, returned to her hometown of Maysville, Missouri, after earning an engineering degree. She joined the pathway program to prepare for medical school and is now enrolled at UMKC’s St. Joseph Campus.
“This rural community is my home,” Brock said. “These are my people, they're very important to me in my life and I would like to give back to them.”
Brock plans to finish medical school in 2028, and her choice to attend UMKC was an easy one.
“I was really serious about wanting to go to a rural campus,” she said. “And the program showed me how much UMKC was also invested in developing rural students."
A Permanent Home for Rural Medical Education in St. Joseph
When UMKC opened the St. Joseph Campus, it partnered with Mosaic Life Care to train students in rural care settings. Students attended classes at Mosaic until this past August, when the new education building opened across the street from the hospital.
“If we want to have any kind of relief for the physician shortage, we have to train people who are passionate about the communities they serve,” Spears said.
That commitment came full circle this past year, as the first St. Joseph cohort graduated and matched into residencies across the state.
“A third of the class specialized in family practice, and many of those expressed interest in coming back, specifically to Mosaic, if not the northwest,” Wacker said.
While the need for family medicine physicians is especially high in rural areas, Wacker also celebrated the students matching into a wide range of specialties.
“These areas don't need just primary care,” he said. “They need every specialty. So, we're excited by the diversity of matches,” which, in addition to family medicine and internal medicine, included radiation oncology, psychiatry, emergency, otolaryngology, obstetrics and gynecology, neurology, orthopedic surgery and interventional radiology.
Training Doctors to Stay: A New Rural Residency Model
Additionally, when it comes to residency programs, UMKC is developing solutions to help promote the rural healthcare path to new doctors.
UMKC’s new 1+2 residency program allows recent medical school graduates to spend one year at the University Health Lakewood Medical Center in Kansas City followed by two years at Mosaic Medical Center in Maryville, Missouri, so they can gain experience in a large hospital setting as well as a rural one.
“Primary care doctors in rural areas are called upon to do more,” said Lane Wilson, M.D., family medicine residency director for the 1+2 rural family medicine residency. “Training in a broad scope is super important for family docs in rural areas so they can offer a comprehensive range of services.”
Looking Ahead
With a pipeline that includes early support, rural training and dedicated residencies, UMKC is taking long-term steps to address the rural shortages.
“It is my hope that our St. Joseph medical school will flourish and help populate rural Missouri with outstanding practitioners,” Norbash said. “I genuinely hope that our model is one that is successful and is duplicated. Hopefully, someday in the not-too-distant future, I see rural satellite medical schools in all four corners of the state of Missouri, producing outstanding graduates who choose to stay in our beautiful state, and serve our beloved citizens. If our vision were realized, we would be able to educate and graduate the physicians we need to completely address our physician shortage in rural locations.”
As UMKC looks to expand its rural impact even further, faculty and students are already seeing the payoff — rural residency programs taking root, permanent medical school home in St. Joseph and rural students finding their path to medicine.
“We have started something that’s going to pay big dividends to this region,” Wacker said.
