Last night my husband demoed his shiny new iPhone 4 to a group of friends over dinner. As he video chatted with his brother using the FaceTime feature, a doctor friend turned to me and said, "Can you imagine how this technology will revolutionize medicine?" In all honesty, I couldn't.
So I was especially glad to read that medical educators gathered yesterday at the New York Academy of Sciences for a forum titled "Innovating and Updating the Medical School Curriculum" to discuss how advances in science and technology will shape new models for physician training.
At the meeting, Clarence Braddock, MD, associate dean for medical education at the School of Medicine, presented on the importance of reconciling the promise and peril of education technologies. Other speakers included Carol Storey-Johnson, MD, dean for education at Weill Cornell Medical College, who spoke about the need to integrate biomedical science and clinical experience throughout medical school, and Marc M. Triola, MD, of New York University School of Medicine, who talked about curriculum changes underway at his institution to emphasize recent innovations in educational technology such as virtual patients, visualizing surgical procedures using 3D models and online teaching labs for histopathology.
Abstracts from the forum are available here.
