UT’s Dell Medical School Starts Construction

AUSTIN, Texas — Construction of the new Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin is currently underway in the southeastern portion of campus. A ceremony at the construction site was held April 21 to unveil a new mosaic rendering of the project.

The project will make the University of Texas at Austin the first tier-one university in the United States to establish a new medical school in decades. The 515,000-square-foot school will include research, education and administrative facilities in addition to a medical office building and parking garage. The new school will take from Austin’s technology and research communities to find new ways both to educate medical professionals and deliver health services.

“We have a responsibility to take advantage of our newness,” said Dell Medical School Dean Clay Johnston at the groundbreaking ceremony, “to test out different ways of doing things that could become models for the rest of the country.”

In 2012, Travis County voters approved a proposal to increase the tax rate for Central Health, the countywide hospital district, and commit $35 million each year to support the medical school. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation soon after pledged an additional $50 million to establish the school. Last year, the UT System Board of Regents committed $334 million for the construction, and the Seton Healthcare Family committed $295 million — a portion of which will come from fundraising — to build a new 211-bed teaching hospital to replace the aging University Medical Center Brackenridge. Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas will serve as the medical school’s primary clinical in-patient teaching facility and enhance services to residents of Central Texas.

“The Dell Medical School will embody the next innovation — and hopefully many hundreds of innovations — in medical education, and indeed, in health care itself,” said President Bill Powers at the groundbreaking ceremony.

Phase I of the project requires the replacement of the Penick-Allison Tennis Center, in which the university’s Athletics Department will manage the relocation of the facility. There are no current plans to demolish the current University Medical Center Breckenridge. It will continue to function until the new teaching hospital is built and plans are made to move operations there. After the move, the Brackenridge may be repurposed for other uses yet to be determined.

The first facilities are expected to be complete for the inaugural class of students in fall 2016. Dallas-based HKS Inc. is the architect on the project.