Rivalries were put aside Tuesday when the University of Arizona College of Medicine was inaugurated at the Downtown campus, and now it represents an important asset to the development of health care in Arizona.
Susan Guthrie, associate director of public affairs for the UA College of Medicine, said the opening of the college downtown would bring significant economic growth to the area.
Guthrie said that by 2025 the College of Medicine is expected to bring $2.1 billion per year to Arizona's economy.
She also said that the new college is expected to contribute to the creation of 14,000 to 24,000 jobs per year.
"The economic effects of the arrival of the new College of Medicine in Phoenix can be compared to a big rock hitting a pond," Guthrie added. "The economic implications will be huge."
Guthrie also said the new UA college would help attract bioscience firms to the Phoenix area.
"A biomedical campus is an important component to making the Phoenix area a more attractive spot for health-care institutions."
According to Kathleen Matt, director of clinical partnerships at ASU, the new medical school will become part of existing academic programs brought forth by collaborative efforts of health-care institutions and Arizona universities.
"The school of medicine is going to bring more students to institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and Banner Health to acquire clinical experience," Matt said.
But the real impact the College of Medicine will have on the health-care institutions in Arizona, according to Matt, is the significant increase in the number of physicians in the state.
Bill Byron, system director of public relations for Banner Health agreed. Byron said the medical doctors graduating from the UA College of Medicine in downtown Phoenix would be an enormous benefit to the state.
"Because Banner Health is the largest provider of health care in Arizona, we see the opening of a medical school in Phoenix as an extremely important development to us and to the state of Arizona," Byron said.
"We have a long-standing relationship with UA, and this relationship will definitely strengthen with the opening of the UA College of Medicine in Phoenix," he added.
The partnership between medical businesses and the new UA College of Medicine was further invigorated by biomedical informatics projects brought forth by the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the ASU School of Computing and Informatics.
Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the School of Computing and Informatics, said biomedical informatics would have a major impact on the health-care field.
"The Department of Biomedical Informatics is working with the Translational Genomics Research Institute [TGen] in the development of a new master's and doctorate program for the colleges of informatics and of medicine," Panchanathan said.
"The college of informatics, the new medical school and health-care institutions such as Banner Health, Mayo Clinic and the Barrow Neurological Institute are collaborative partners in important biomedical research that will greatly benefit the health-care field."
Reach the reporter at Amanda.Soares@asu.edu.