Over on The Health Care Blog, Michael Painter, MD, JD, shares his thoughts from a recent meeting at Stanford's medical school inviting medical education leaders to debate big questions in their field. Painter, a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, explained that meeting participants discussed ways that educators can use technology and other tools "to help create a durable culture of health for all."
From the post:
In 2013 we extended a $312,000 grant to Stanford Medical School that will support work by five medical schools, Stanford, Duke, University of Washington, UCSF and University of Michigan, as they create a consensus knowledge map of the critical things medical students should learn.
Why a knowledge map? The simple answer: because there isn’t one, and we need one if we’re going to build massive core online medical education content.
Why change now? There’s building pressure on fortress academia: pressure to push health care toward high value, pressure for health care to center itself on the patient rather than the professional, and pressure from technology, specifically the ability to move previously closely held knowledge of the expert more efficiently to the learner.
Here’s where this mapping effort also starts to get interesting. It wouldn’t be that surprising if these education leaders ticked through all the reasons why change is too hard—why it can’t or won’t happen. Instead something marvelous is happening: they’re challenging each other to examine the time they spend with their students—asking if they ignite the kind of passion in their learners that others ignited in them.
An even more hopeful sign—these leaders want to connect the teaching of new healers—from the beginning—with the key partner: the patient. Their early reimagining is fixed on patient and story.
Previously: A closer look at using the “flipped classroom” model at the School of Medicine, Combining online learning and the Socratic method to reinvent medical school courses, Using the “flipped classroom” model to re-imagine medical education and Stanford professors propose re-imagining medical education with “lecture-less” classes
