Health care alliance prepares for active 2025

Hal Higdon: Students save money when higher ed schools collaborate.

As the calendar will soon turn to 2025, officials with a collaborative health care education nonprofit say plans are moving toward renovation work they expect will boost its workforce development efforts.

The Alliance for Healthcare Education, formed last year by CoxHealth, Missouri State University, Ozarks Technical Community College and Springfield Public Schools, is working on development plans at its home on the Cox North campus.

Plans call for renovating around 45,000 square feet at Cox North into educational and clinical spaces. The square footage is an increase from the 30,000 square feet the organization originally planned to renovate, said Shallina Goodnight, the alliance’s executive director.

Goodnight, formerly administrative director for CoxHealth at Home, was hired as the alliance’s first employee in March, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. The organization’s second hire, Tina Pham-Morgan, began last month as its director of operations.

Groundbreaking for the renovation work is targeted for summer 2025, Goodnight said, adding DeWitt & Associates Inc. is general contractor and Paragon Architecture LLC is serving as project architect.

The project is in the design and preconstruction stages.

She said the project is being funded by $15 million the alliance received this summer from the state’s fiscal 2025 budget. The new square footage will fill additional space at Cox College, which is merging its programming into the Alliance for Healthcare Education. Cox College is part of the Cox North campus.

The alliance is building upon existing health care training programs at MSU and Ozarks Tech and providing space for more high school students to explore health care careers.

That includes taking courses toward certifications and degrees, officials say. Springfield Public Schools students can access certificate and associate degree programs at no cost, while health care employees can pursue education funded by their employers.

“This is not a health care initiative, and it’s not an education initiative. This is workforce development,” she said. “That means if there are enough students that are interested in a program right now at a higher ed institution, they probably will figure out how to create a pathway for a degree for those students. That’s not this. We only will create and provide certification and degree pathways that result in a needed position.”

Goodnight says the alliance’s work is informed by its workforce partners and what their needs are today and years in the future.

“We’re going to make sure that we have the pathways built to be able to support the needs of the workforce,” she said, noting program graduates will be qualified to work in needed health care roles.

The renovation project is estimated to wrap by summer 2027, she said.

Moving the needle
For someone going into an allied health profession, Goodnight said the typical path is graduating from high school and then going on to college.

“That’s not what’s going to move the needle,” she said, adding the alliance intends to become the largest producer of allied health professionals in the region. “So, juniors and seniors in high school will be able to come to school here on this campus.”

An initial cohort of 32 Springfield high school students began in the alliance program this fall. Up to another 50 juniors and seniors will be selected in January from among applicants to join the program. Goodnight said the application period is still open at SPS.

“By high school, we’re creating a pipeline of workforce-ready individuals. Not everyone needs a four-year degree,” she said. “We want to make sure that students have what they need to be able to go out into the workforce as soon as high school is over if they want to.”

It’s hands-on learning in an accelerated pathway, Goodnight said, adding the education is tailored to allied health careers. Examples include nurses, radiographers, occupational therapists and pharmacy technicians.

“They are immersed in real-life clinical environments and real-life clinical scenarios that entire time,” she said. “They’re able to really see the big wide world of what health care actually is and find out maybe what they would be interested in, and also what they’re not interested in, which is sometimes equally as important.”

One of those clinical environments is the former intensive care unit area at Cox North, which was part of a nearly $7 million renovation project at Cox College completed in early 2020, according to past reporting.

The ICU space is now utilized for student training, said Carol Francka, dean of nursing and director of clinical skills and simulation center at Cox College. CoxHealth provides all the equipment for the space.

“In here we have nine fully functioning patient rooms. They’re set up kind of to mimic the ICU rooms at Cox South,” Francka said, adding they utilize high-fidelity mannequins, including ones that train students on births, as well as infant and elderly care.

She said staff create medical scenarios for students, which allows them to experience a variety of challenges in advance of actual challenges with live patients.

“The goal is to try to create as many hours out of a classroom and in environments like these that you’re seeing now to better prepare students to be successful moving forward,” Goodnight said.

Francka said she’s excited about the oncoming renovations that will expose more students to the health care industry.

“It’s just going to be amazing that we can leverage this and use it for the medical profession,” she said.

Making an impact
Evangel University in July became the first affiliate partner of the alliance, according to past reporting.

Students at the school will have access beginning in fall 2025 to the same services, activities and collaborative opportunities as the founding partners, officials say. Evangel students who are pursuing health sciences careers will have the opportunity to participate in the Alliance for Healthcare Education’s dual-degree program with MSU, allowing them to earn a bachelor’s in health care from Evangel and a second degree in nursing from MSU.

In the Alliance for Healthcare Education, the executive director of each founding partner serves as a board member for the organization, along with a community member.

Board member Hal Higdon, chancellor of Ozarks Tech, said Evangel becoming an affiliate partner is part of the alliance’s goal to spread the word to other organizations in the area.

For Ozarks Tech, he said, opening itself to this partnership was a win all around.

“By bringing together more than 30 health care programs from Ozarks Tech and Missouri State, our students now have a smoother educational journey that can start in high school and go all the way through the doctoral level,” he said via email.

He added, “The impact this alliance will have on workforce development in the Springfield region is significant because it removes barriers that tend to exist between educational institutions and brings successful programs together for the benefit of the students. Their learning is more consistent and their ability to transfer is more seamless.

“When institutions work together, students save money and time.”

Goodnight said conversations with other potential partners in the education and health care fields are in progress, but she declined to identify the organizations.

“We should have lots of news to share in the next couple of months,” she said.

Part of the ongoing discussions involve expansion beyond Springfield, as the alliance wants to be a regional resource, Goodnight said. Driving every day to the Cox North campus isn’t a feasible option for everyone the organization wants to reach.

“How do we create and leverage our resources and our partners’ resources to be able to create similar experiences? If you are 20 minutes past Lebanon, what does that look like in our rural communities?” she said, adding that includes utilizing rural health care providers to reach students. “If we’re going to have the impact that we want to have, we need to be able to stretch further out than who could physically get to this location. So that is definitely a kind of three- to five-year rollout.”