On July 5, the inaugural University of Texas Dell Medical School class will begin studies. Fifty medical students, 90 percent of whom are from Texas, were chosen out of more than 4,500 applicants, putting the acceptance rate into the school at 1 percent.

The Dell Medical School curriculum will differ from traditional medical schools, and the school seeks to become an agent of change in the health care industry.

“We believe, in fact, that [in the] health care industry that the health focus has been lost,” said Mini Kahlon, vice dean for strategy and partnerships at Dell Medical School. “We want to bring that back and make health front and center.”

To do that, officials at Dell Medical School are creating a new strategy on which health care systems could be built.

Nearly four years after Travis County voters approved a 5 cent property tax increase in part to provide funding to the medical school, the campus is beginning to take shape. The 75,000-square-foot Health Learning Building, where classes will take place, was completed in late May and will be ready for occupancy June 27.

Construction of the Health Transformation and Health Discovery buildings, where Dell Medical School innovations will be presented and researched, respectively, is set to be completed by August, and will be fully occupied by 2018.

The Health Transformation Building will provide a showcase of the types of innovations the school hopes to bring about. Kahlon said the teams in the building’s educational clinics will be more multidisciplinary and structured differently than in a traditional setting. For example, a surgeon would typically be the head of an osteoarthritic care team in today’s health care model; a surgeon will not lead the team in the Dell Medical School’s model, she said.

“If a surgeon is head of the team, then you know that the answer [to an ailment] is going to be surgery, whereas if the surgeon is a member of the team then you know that you are actually vetting all the [care] options,” she said.

The total cost of constructing the campus is $436 million. According to the school, it is the only medical school in the country to receive most of its funding from local property tax revenue. With such a substantial sum of its budget coming from the community, Dell Medical School dean Dr. Clay Johnston said the institution will have a unique relationship with Travis County. Among the goals of the school is to make Austin a model city for health worldwide. Although Austin has a reputation for active and healthy residents, it is a city with vast health disparities, Johnston said.

One way to address such disparities could be to make health care more affordable. Johnston said Dell Medical School is moving away from the traditional fee-for-service model, the underlying cause of an annual $25,000-per-family cost of health care in the U.S., by far the most expensive health care system in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

“Health care is not working well,” Johnston said. “[It is] too expensive [and] not [creating] the kind of outcomes we want. It’s not really designed with a desire for health. … Because we can start from scratch … we are designing ourselves to be much better aligned with society’s interests in health.”