NEW ORLEANS — Leaders of the nation’s forthcoming Black Catholic medical school, Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine, joined fellow health experts on a panel this week discussing the future of diverse healthcare in America.
The event, part of the Global Black Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Business Summit, took place in partnership with the Essence Festival, a yearly event that celebrates Black culture and brings hundreds of thousands of Black Americans each year to the Crescent City.
Panelists at the event, held Thursday at the Four Seasons Hotel, included Xavier University of Louisiana president C. Reynold Verret, XOCOM founding dean Leonardo Seoane, Trust for America’s Health CEO J. Nadine Gracia, and Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association CEO Mary E. Stutts.
“People may not know, but… we will not be the first HBCU medical school in New Orleans,” said Seoane, speaking on the historical closure of most Black colleges of medicine in the early 20th century, and the lasting impacts on Black doctor shortages.
“There's a true physician workforce crisis in the United States. It's up to 86,000 short and heading in the wrong direction. When you look at the impact it has in communities, especially minority communities,, it is physicians from those communities who actually go back and practice in those communities. And it's the HBCUs that train the majority of Black and brown physicians in the United States.”
The opening of new HBCU medical schools is also seen as a move in pursuit not just of workforce equity, but of equal standards of care. According to studies, Black health outcomes in America are negatively affected by a lack of cultural sensitivity and even outright racist assumptions on the part of healthcare providers.
Research and innovation is also key, said Verret, who connected the business enterprise of medicine to the improvement in the practice of medicine, with med schools incubating the next generation of scholars and providers.
“Medical scientists who are coming out of institutions like XOCOM, and other medical schools as well, are the creators of an industry that the United States has relied upon,” he said.
“But that makes us healthy as well. That’s an important piece. That talent we have to educate. If we leave that talent uneducated and untrained, we do that at our own peril.”
Seoane also noted that a shortage of medical schools overall—rooted, like HBCU med school closures, in the 1910 Flexner Report—has led to many American students pursuing medical degrees outside of the United States. As a result, he said, schools like XOCOM are an immediate necessity and can also bring economic revitalization.
For XOCOM, that goal is already in sight, with plans for the first class of students to be welcomed in the coming years. No firm date has been set, as the school is still working toward accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. XOCOM plans to seat 50 students in its inaugural cohort.
In the past year, the school has raised significant financial support, including $5 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies and $1 million from Pan-American Life Insurance Group. These donations have come even as the school seeks to hire its founding executive director for development.
Amid its centennial year, XULA itself has maintained a reputation for producing Black graduates who go on to complete terminal degrees in the health sciences. XOCOM will likely be the fifth active HBCU medical school when it opens, joining those at Howard University in Washington, Morehouse College in Atlanta, and Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Morgan State University in Baltimore is slated to open its new medical school this fall—the first for an HBCU in nearly half a century.
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
