One of California‘s newest medical schools is located in an area that doesn’t have enough medical care. This is a small but interesting irony. For cutting edge medical education, Colton is not the place to go. Colton is a city in San Bernardino County in the Inland Empire. The California University of Science and Medicine ended up there, though, for that very reason.
Heart doctor Prem Reddy started the school, which is now called CUSM, in 2015. He also owns Prime Healthcare, a for-profit hospital network that runs 44 hospitals across the country. It wasn’t a random choice to build a medical school. Reddy had seen the same problem in American healthcare for years: there weren’t enough doctors, and poor and rural areas were hit the hardest by the shortage. In a lot of ways, CUSM was his answer to that bother.
The money came first. The school opened with a $40 million gift from the Prime Healthcare Foundation in 2014. With help from the Dr. Prem Reddy Family Foundation, that amount eventually went over $60 million. To give you some background, starting an official medical school is a very difficult and pricey task that most private donors never attempt. Some questions still need to be answered about whether the model will work in the long run, but for now, the finances look good.
In 2018, CUSM opened its doors, and by 2020, the campus was fully built. It has three labs, two lecture halls, nine college rooms, fifteen clinical skills rooms, and two lecture halls. The whole building was designed and built to train doctors, not taken from somewhere else. More than 2,400 students applied for that first class, which shows that people want new ways to become doctors, especially in a region where getting medical care has been a problem for a long time.
The school gave out its first medical degrees on May 21, 2022. A total of 64 doctors graduated and went into a field that really needed them. I feel like that moment is almost too quiet. In Colton, 64 people walking across a stage doesn’t make national news, but it was big news in the areas around the Inland Empire.
Arrowhead Regional Medical Center is CUSM’s main teaching hospital. It gives students clinical experience with patients who are like the ones they’ll likely be working with after they graduate: underinsured, working-class people with long-term conditions that aren’t managed properly for too long. That match between the training environment and a need in the real world feels like it was done on purpose, and it probably was.
The Reddy Family Foundation gives scholarships to many students, which helps them avoid some of the debt that makes young doctors want to work in higher-paying specialties and wealthier areas. It’s still not clear if that’s enough to keep graduates working as doctors in underserved areas. Loan forgiveness and scholarship programs have had mixed results when it comes to keeping people in the same area over time.
After that, in February 2026, CUSM got full approval from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which is the highest level of approval for medical schools in the United States. To get there, it took years of work, paperwork, and close attention from institutions. Being accredited doesn’t make a school great by itself, but it’s also not very useful without it. It’s important to note that CUSM cleared that bar.
When you look at this school, you can’t help but think that its founders was stubbornly sure (or right) that policy alone wouldn’t solve the problem of a lack of doctors. People sometimes choose to just build something.
