A Methodology for Estimating the Cost of Educating Military Physicians at the Uniformed Services University

The Department of Defense (DoD) operates a large, multi-channeled physician accession pipeline to maintain a professional workforce of over 10,000 active duty physicians. The Uniformed Services University (USU) operates the nation's only federal medical school providing trained doctors to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Public Health Service. Although the school serves an essential purpose, policymakers question the cost of operating the University's medical school. One challenge is to develop reproducible and transparent costing methods that can be used to evaluate the University's value and efficiency.

This work proposes a replicable methodology for estimating the cost per student-year at USU. Using detailed data from USU encompassing facility use, budgeting and expenditures, and faculty and student rosters, we break out and attribute costs to the University's component schools. Using faculty and staff time-use surveys, we further break out education-related personnel costs from other University activities such as research and service. We can then calculate the School of Medicine's annual cost to educate a uniformed physician.

In Fiscal Year 2017, it cost the DoD approximately $253,000 per year (more than $1 million dollars total over a 4-year curriculum) to directly educate a physician though the USU School of Medicine. Data from the following Fiscal Year show that education costs grew a modest 2.1% per student-year.

This work provides a foundational framework and approach to estimate the costs of accessioning a physician at USU. This methodology can be replicated for subsequent value analyses of physician accession and retention as budgetary pressures change to match the DoD operating environment. Uniformed Services University's costs should be periodically reassessed against those of alternative accession sources.