AMNA NAWAZ: Well, a painting certainly can't help fix America's health care system, but it might help the healers themselves.

That's one idea behind a new medical school in Arkansas.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled there to speak with Alice Walton, who created and funded this effort.

For the record, the Walton Family Foundation is a funder of the "News Hour."

The piece is part of our coverage of the intersection of health and arts, part of our Canvas series.

JEFFREY BROWN: A sprawling 134-acre campus in Bentonville, Arkansas, the 14-year-old Crystal Bridges Museum of American art, the 6-year-old Heartland Whole Health Institute, and a brand-new medical school with a design evoking the local Ozark geology.

Bringing art, health, and education together is the goal of the woman behind it all, Alice Walton.

ALICE WALTON, Founder, Alice L. Walton Medical School: We can collide these wonderful industries and wonderful people and really let them learn from each other and figure it out.

JEFFREY BROWN: Health, art, put them together?

ALICE WALTON: Yes, yes, collide.

I like the collision.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: Strong door.

Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, is one of the world's richest individuals.

ALICE WALTON: Here we go.

JEFFREY BROWN: But here she drives herself around in her own little putt-putt.

ALICE WALTON: It only goes 25 miles and a half or so.

I can't exactly speed.

JEFFREY BROWN: You're not too dangerous.

ALICE WALTON: I'm not too dangerous, I don't think.

JEFFREY BROWN: One area where Walton is trying to cause some trouble, the nation's health care system, now by creating the Alice L. Walton school of medicine, known by its acronym, AWSOM, not a word she would use to describe health care today.

ALICE WALTON: The real problem with health care is that there's no incentive in the payment system for doctors to spend time helping you learn what good nutrition is, how important exercise is.

And, frankly, doctors aren't taught those things because they're not paid for those things.

JEFFREY BROWN: So that means the medical education system is... ALICE WALTON: Is faulty.

It is focused on let people get sick and we will fix you.

So what we're trying to do is, yes, our docs will be allopathic docs.

They will know how to fix you, but they will know how to keep you healthy.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's starting out small and offering free tuition to the first five classes.

The 48 students in the school's first group take traditional science-based and clinical courses, including working on simulations of the human body.

But there's also a heavy emphasis here on whole health concepts, not just the absence of illness, but a broader sense of well-being that encompasses physical, mental, behavioral, and other factors in a person's life, not a new idea in medical practice or education, but a core concept here.

And one way to get there, through integrating the arts into the training of new doctors.

DR.

STEPHEN NIX, Assistant Professor, Alice L. Walton School of Medicine: When I heard that there was going to be a medical school on a museum campus, I knew that I had to come here for this job.

JEFFREY BROWN: That was you.

Dr.

STEPHEN NIX: That was me.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr.

Stephen Nix, one of the brand-new faculty, is a neuropathologist.

He was also an English major as an undergraduate, is studying for a master's in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University while working on a novel and loves to look at art, now, with young med students, incorporating it into the curriculum.

One goal, a deeper sense of curiosity and empathy.

DR.

STEPHEN NIX: Curiosity is the first step.

Are we actually curious to learn more about someone or something?

For care and connection to happen, you have to truly want to know more about another person.

And art is a great way to be curious in a safe way with other students, where you're thinking about meaning.

JEFFREY BROWN: Another goal, learning how to observe, how to really look.

DR.

STEPHEN NIX: A lot of times medical students, especially, and health care professionals in general, we get really wrapped up into what is the right answer, what's right and wrong?

And sometimes that can prevent us from really engaging and thinking about something.

So we can start with art.

And then we're looking at the histology of perhaps a cancer or an inflammatory disease or the radiology.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you want them to look at it in a different way, the way they're looking at the painting.

DR.

STEPHEN NIX: That's right.

ELLIE ANDREW-VAUGHAN, Student, Alice L. Walton Medical School: We're really sort of like the pioneers trying to figure out how this is going to work.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's how you feel?

ELLIE ANDREW-VAUGHAN: A little bit, yes, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Twenty-three-year-old Ellie Andrew-Vaughan of Ann Arbor, Michigan is one of the first cohort of students.

Yes, she's studying traditional ways to be able to fix future patients, but she's also found herself at Crystal Bridges in front of Norman Rockwell's famous Rosie the Riveter canvas.

ELLIE ANDREW-VAUGHAN: We had a session where we were just like sitting there and going, OK, let's, like, stare at this painting for 15 minutes and try to come up with everything that we see on the painting and then everything that we're not seeing that might have contributed to the painting.

So, like, what is she looking at that's off of the screen or what, like, are some of the things in her background and trying to sort of extrapolate those things.

JEFFREY BROWN: And then using that to think about a patient in front of you?

ELLIE ANDREW-VAUGHAN: Yes, how to sort of, like, extrapolate what's going on in their life and what are some of sort of the factors that are bringing them in and having them be in my office right now?

AUSTEN BARRON BAILLY, Chief Curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art: How can works from our collection help tell the stories of the interconnections between our interiors and our exteriors, between mind and body?

JEFFREY BROWN: From the art side of things, Crystal Bridges curators like Austen Barron Bailly are now focused on what they can bring to the whole health focus and curriculum.

She put together an exhibition from the museum's collection titled The Art of Whole Health, works in which artists have addressed directly or indirectly their own experiences of health and wellness.

And though she told me she'd never even been in a medical school before this, the connections were immediately clear.

AUSTEN BARRON BAILLY: All of the ways in which art historians look at a work of art to try to understand it, from its time and place to its relevance today, has an analog in how doctors in training are trying to think about understanding a patient, whether it's a diagnosis, whether it's a mental health issue.

I think the principles of whole health actually relate very closely to the holistic way that we try to understand a work of art.

JEFFREY BROWN: Another key component of the arts integration here, the need for doctors to know and care for themselves, burnout, depression and worse.

Studies show suicide rates among health care professionals are significantly higher than for the general public.

ALICE WALTON: And we have got to learn to teach in a different way to reduce the stress, to teach our docs and our health care professionals, give them a space that they can manage, learn to manage their stress and anxiety with, because it comes with the job.

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, caring for oneself is how this all began for Alice Walton.

A car accident in the 1980s left her with serious injuries requiring operations over more than a decade, along with the anxieties and depression of chronic illness.

It was then she turned to art books and watercolors.

ALICE WALTON: I would paint where I wanted to be, not where I was.

You know, it helped me keep myself centered and not fall into the whole of depression that can happen when you have constant surgeries and constant problems.

So I really -- it was my armor.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, from that, you can draw a direct line to collecting art, creating the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and now a new medical school.

It's all very personal and put in terms any of us can understand.

ALICE WALTON: When I saw the impact that art had on my own situation, the positive impact, it's hard to understand why the health care systems want to put you in white walls and no windows and -- yes, and feed you bad food.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: The next questions, will Alice L. Walton School of Medicine be as awesome as it aspires to be and live up to its name, and can it offer a model others can replicate in this country and abroad?

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Bentonville, Arkansas.