When I look back, I marvel at how poorly my educational experiences of 30 years ago would have prepared me for the actualities of medical practice today.
The first big difference—hands down—is debt. Students today graduate with a burden that would have been incomprehensible in the “good old days.”
Then there is a tsunami of new knowledge and skills we need today, from dealing with the burden of chronic diseases to employing electronic health records (EHR), practicing in interprofessional teams, keeping up with new technology and managing entirely new diseases. AIDS, for example, was discovered when I was in medical school.
Couple all that with the fact that medical education has not really changed since my time (or long before that), and it is easy to grasp the value of the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative. Grants to 11 innovative medical schools have opened a floodgate of ideas, all aimed at making sure the next generation of physicians is ready to take on the realities of modern medical practice. The AMA has formed a consortium with representatives of those 11 medical schools to share advances and best practices, and they came together in early April to discuss their progress. While they agreed developing a new type of medical education is far more complex than anticipated, the take-aways from the meeting are significant.
Here is a small sample of what is happening, and the kinds of changes we can expect to see in medical curricula before the decade is out:
- The University of Michigan Medical School has implemented pilot programs for interprofessional education, including pairing medical students with nursing and social work students to learn how to break bad news to patients.
- Vanderbilt University School of Medicine has instituted a system that allows students to get real-time reports on their own progress and assessments.
- The University of California San Francisco School of Medicine is designing competency milestones to allow students to learn and progress at their own pace. This is not a simple step. To be successful, it requires greater linkage between undergraduate and graduate education, an issue that is being addressed through the University of California Davis School of Medicine’s grant project.
- At UC-Davis, new students immediately participate in ambulatory care settings so as to promote seamless integration between their medical education and entry into clinical practice.
Other components of the projects at the 11 schools are just as exciting. They include: using EHR systems to teach clinical decision-making, increasing focus on the links between community and medical care, cultivating interdisciplinary teams, and providing in-depth training for care coordination and quality improvement. Each of the projects aims to align medical education with the needs of today’s patients and our evolving health care system.
As you can tell, I am excited about what these changes in medical education will mean for physicians and the profession of medicine. It reaffirms my optimism about our ability to adapt to the new realities of health care.
Students look at their careers stretching out before them, and the time ahead seems unfathomably long and extremely challenging. However, the inventive work of these medical schools will help make those long years ahead simpler and more satisfying for the next generation of physicians by better preparing them for the world of 21st-century medicine.
