Though Colorado, like most other states, has seen its health care industry become the largest employment sector (eclipsing retail), one might not get that sense in our more rural areas. Even as medical services overall have expanded amid the explosion of the Front Range population, health care supply has fallen far short of demand out on the eastern plains and much of the Western Slope.

Sure, Colorado welcomes transplants and immigrants to physicians’ ranks. But to have a sufficient supply of doctors to meet the need for care in our state, there is only so much recruitment of medical expertise from outside Colorado that can occur. As Coach Prime has learned with CU’s football team, the transfer portal doesn’t always provide. Eventually, more reliable homegrown talent needs to be groomed. That’s true, whether it involves the recruitment of freshman Buffalo football players — or of doctors for the Centennial State’s hospitals and medical providers.

A news update last week in The Gazette, on plans for the University of Northern Colorado to open its new College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2026, reminds us help is on the way for Colorado’s health-care market. 

UNC’s new medical school is projected to have the ability to graduate 150 doctors per academic year. That should lift Colorado — the 21st-most populous state in the union as of 2024 — up from its ranking at No. 28 in the U.S. for enrolled medical students per capita.

UNC’s new medical school, estimated to boost Colorado’s economy by $1.4 billion during the next two decades, will actually be our state’s third medical school — the other two being the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine and Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine.

With its campus location in Greeley, UNC’s new medical school will mean expanded health care not only for the burgeoning population of Weld County — it experienced a 30% population boom from 2010 to 2020 — but also for a vast swath of rural Colorado’s ranching, farming and mining communities that have been starved for medical providers. 

As the Gazette reported, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration notes only 35% of Colorado’s physician needs are being met, and the Cicero Institute says 54 of Colorado’s 64 counties presently contain regions with professional shortage areas in primary care. A lot of that underserved area consists of the state’s vast rural reaches.

“There’s a constant turnover of physicians in a lot of these rural communities,” Dr. Kelli Glaser, UNC’s chair of primary care for its medical school, told The Gazette. 

“I knew that with the positioning of UNC in Greeley, it would probably more directly meet the need and recruit students who came from areas nearby, especially the rural areas, and that they might be more likely to return to those rural areas to practice. I wanted to help foster that taking place.”

In December, UNC should receive pre-accreditation status to actively recruit and enroll medical students on campus next August. It’ll be a boon to our state’s health care economy — and to the health of Coloradans far and wide.