Georgia is the largest state in the country with only one public medical school, and the proposal to expand the Medical College of Georgia to Athens is part of a solution.

“Of the 10 largest states, all but Georgia have at least three public medical schools,” a 2007 report by the Georgia Board for Physician Workforce states.

The Board of Regents voted Monday in a special conference call meeting to accept a report by Pittsburgh-based consulting firm Tripp-Umbach for the purposes of planning the expansion of the Medical College of Georgia.

The plan calls for the expansion of MCG from 745 students to 1,200 by 2020. It also recommends that medical classes begin in Athens by 2009 or 2010.

MCG is the largest of five medical schools in the state. According to a 2007 report by the Georgia Board for Physician Workforce, there were 734 students enrolled at MCG in 2006-2007 and 99.5 percent of those were native Georgians.

In 2005, the American Medical Association approximated 51.3 percent of MCG’s alumni practice medicine in Georgia. About 39 percent of medical school graduates nationally practice in the state in which they graduated.

The capacity of MCG has not kept pace with the growth of the state, according to Tripp-Umbach’s report.

The joint venture between the University and MCG will offer an economic boost to Northeast Georgia and allow the state to increase the number of physicians it produces each year.

MCG’s Augusta campus also will expand, but it does not have the space or resources to accommodate the statewide expansion necessary, the report says.

“Athens and Gainesville offer robust medical communities, including many physicians who are MCG alumni and are interested in teaching MCG medical students,” according to a letter written by University System of Georgia Chancellor Erroll Davis, MCG President Daniel Rahn and University President Michael Adams, which is posted on the regents’ Web site.

The state gave more than $33 million last year to private medical schools at Mercer University, Morehouse College and Emory University as part of a public-private partnership allowing those schools to produce more doctors to meet state medical needs, the Georgia Board for Physician Workforce report says. The fifth medical school in the state, the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (Georgia Campus), opened in 2005 and does not receive state funding.

The Georgia Board of Physician Workforce report says Mercer, Emory and Morehouse trained 56 percent of the state’s medical school graduates in 2006.

“Students would have to pay tuition of approximately $90,000 per year if public funding was withdrawn, further increasing student debt and making the field of medicine less attractive,” the report states.

Efforts to reach officials at the Georgia Board for Physician Workforce who could answer questions about the effect MCG’s expansion to Athens would have on the state physician shortage were unsuccessful Thursday.

Toni Baker, a spokesperson for MCG, said it is unclear if the education in Athens will differ from the one at the Augusta campus.

“There’s discussions that are just beginning about curriculum development,” she said. “These kinds of details are going to be a while in coming.”

The University’s partnership with MCG builds on a number of existing joint ventures between the two institutions, said John Millsaps, a spokesman for the regents. MCG operates a nursing campus in Athens and the schools collaborate to obtain research grants.

Baker said the associate dean hired to oversee the Athens campus will report to MCG in Augusta, rather than to University administration.