Founded in 1824 as the first school of medicine in the southeastern U.S., Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) is now the core of the state’s largest medical complex and the largest employer in the metropolitan Charleston area with about 10,000 employees. A freestanding academic health center, MUSC is the only tertiary/quaternary care referral center in South Carolina for a statewide population of about 4.3 million people.
MUSC is a state-assisted institution. The South Carolina General Assembly and Governor appoint the Board of Trustees, who in turn select the President The Vice President for Academic Affairs serves as Provost and Chief Academic Officer. The Dean of the College of Medicine serves as Vice President for Medical Affairs. The Chief Executive Officer of the Medical Center serves as Vice President for Clinical Operations. These dual appointments ensure that strategic planning, implementation, and oversight are closely and continuously coordinated to provide excellent education, research and patient care in a first-rate academic health center. Although MUSC is a public institution, it receives less than 8% of its total annual budget from the State of South Carolina. The remainder is generated through tuition, patient care fees, federal grants and contracts, and private contributions.
The university has been at its present site on the Charleston peninsula since 1913, currently occupying 76 acres and 88 buildings. Major construction and renovation in the past decade include the Thurmond Biomedical Research Facility and Gazes Cardiac Research Institute (1997), a 3-story addition to the Storm Eye Center (1998), the 10-story Rutledge Tower ambulatory care and ambulatory surgery complex (1998), the 122,000 ft2 Darby Children's Research Institute (2004), expansion of the Hollings Cancer Center (2006), and Phase 1 of a long-term initiative to build an entirely new comprehensive teaching and referral hospital on the west side of campus (2007). Planned facilities include a Drug Discovery Building (120,000 ft2 with construction to start in late 2007) and an adjoining Bioengineering Building of similar size, focusing on translational research programs to generate molecular targets, lead compounds, tissue engineering constructs, novel devices and genomic technologies. Also in planning is a Patient-Oriented Research Tower that will provide a home for MUSC's Clinical and Translational Research Program and the Center for Health Disparities Research, as well patient-oriented research clinics, bioethics and subject advocacy programs, medical imaging, biostatistics, epidemiology and bioinformatics programs, data banks, tissue banks, health economists and health services researchers.
The major organizational components are the MUSC Medical Center and six colleges: Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, Graduate Studies, Health Professions, and Dental Medicine. The Medical University of South Carolina is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) to award bachelor, master, doctoral and professional degrees. (Questions about the academic accreditation of MUSC may be addressed to the Commission on Colleges at 1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, GA 30033-4907, or 404-679-4500). Additional accreditations are provided by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and numerous national, professional and specialized accrediting bodies. The teaching faculty on campus consists of about 1,200 full-time and 200 part-time members. MUSC offers professional education at undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels appropriate to the health care disciplines, awarding about 700 degrees annually with enrollment of more than 2,400 degree-seeking students. In addition, the university coordinates the training of approximately 80 interns, 400 medical/surgical residents and 100 specialty fellows in ACGME-approved programs plus 23 dental residents and 22 pharmacy residents.
MUSC leads the South Carolina Area Health Education Consortium (AHEC), linking the academic health sciences center in Charleston to community-based health care centers statewide with an emphasis on health disparities, rural health issues and access to health care. In 2006 South Carolina AHEC received the prestigious Eugene S. Mayer Award, which is presented every two years to the best model statewide AHEC system in the nation. MUSC has also received national recognition from the Association of American Medical Colleges and other professional associations for outstanding community service and leadership in innovative health services delivery, outreach, and emergency preparedness.
MUSC is the lead biomedical research institution in Health Sciences South Carolina, a statewide consortium to facilitate efficiency and speed in developing, testing and bringing health interventions and therapies to widespread use. Through HSSC, the state’s three research universities and four largest healthcare systems have created a truly statewide integration of scientists, clinicians and data systems. HSSC has active working groups on science, clinical care, information technology and inter-operability, a statewide IRB, and Center for Clinical Safety and Effectiveness that develops and uses state-of-the-art patient simulation technologies. In August 2006, the Duke Endowment announced a three-year, $21 million award to HSSC to help bring about transformational changes in health sciences/services research. This represents the largest single award ever made by the Duke Endowment. As the leading research institution in this innovative collaboration, MUSC is ideally situated to develop additional statewide research networks to conduct translational studies and disseminate findings. Statewide collaborations and the relatively small size of the state enable MUSC investigators to rapidly accrue patients in therapeutic, effectiveness and outcomes trials.