Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich announced that New Mexico State University (NMSU) www.nmsu.edu will receive $488,000 in grant funding from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) www.eda.gov within the Department of Commerce.
The funding will be used to create a healthcare delivery and medical technology development cluster at Arrowhead Park in New Mexico. This will help NMSU expand activities at the Park to enable startup companies to focus on improving healthcare for residents in the state.
New Mexico is at a crossroads with respect to two significant problems. For one thing, there is a severe shortage of healthcare professionals to care for the growing needs of the local population. Secondly, there is a crippling per capita income deficit across the state with more than 40 percent of the children in the state living under the poverty level.
These issues combined with a lack of clear initiatives to address the needs of a workforce trained for higher wage positions, rising costs of healthcare, and a forecast that sees more New Mexico healthcare professionals retiring in the coming years than anywhere else in the country present major problems in the state.
All of these facts, led to the idea to expand Arrowhead Park’s multidisciplinary collaborative business and research environment around a healthcare delivery and medical technology development cluster to be called Health-Tech. Arrowhead Park a public private partnership connecting researchers and entrepreneurs to boost development in the state and the Southwest is located on 115 acres at the southern end of NMSU.
It is expected the funding will be able to use for projects that will be able to supply 580 additional jobs and over $100 million in private building and infrastructure investment. A ten year planning horizon estimates 830 new jobs and $170 million in total private capital investment will take place.