With medicine and health care delivery in the United States constantly changing in new and exciting ways, the American Medical Association is focused on trying new, innovative ways to ensure the physicians and health care professionals of the future are receiving a medical education that is keeping pace with the changes.
In 2013, the AMA created the Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium, with eleven founding schools: Indiana University School of Medicine; Mayo Medical School; New York University School of Medicine; Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine; Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine; The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University; The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University; University of California, Davis, School of Medicine; University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine; University of Michigan Medical School; and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Over the last two years, consortium schools have been focused on incorporating new technology with health care reforms and helping prepare tomorrow’s physicians thrive in today’s medical community. They have been developing flexible, competency-based pathways; working with health care delivery system in novel ways; making technology work for learning; and envisioning the master adaptive learner.
In November of 2015, the American Medical Association selected twenty schools to join the eleven founding members of the Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium, broadening the impact of the consortium to 18,000 medical students, who will provide care for 31 million patients each year.
The goal of the consortium is to improve care for patients with multiple chronic conditions and to develop advance simulations and telemedicine, specific to the needs to rural and remote communities.
The twenty new schools were chosen from over one hundred applicants, all of which offered proposals that would significantly change medical education and were vying for a $75,000 annual grant for assistance in aligning medical education with the twenty-first century health care system.
The twenty new schools are: A.T. Still University of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona; Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine; Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin; Eastern Virginia Medical School; Emory University School of Medicine; Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine; Harvard Medical School; Morehouse School of Medicine; Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine; Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago; Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University; Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education/City College of New York; University of Connecticut School of Medicine; University of Nebraska College of Medicine; University of North Carolina School of Medicine; University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences; University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine; University of Utah School of Medicine; and University of Washington School of Medicine.
These schools will build upon programs and models that were created by the eleven founding schools and were chosen based upon how their proposals would align with and enhance the original eleven schools’ programs and how feasible nationwide implementation is.
Some of the initiatives that the twenty new schools will focus on are: working on expanding the patient-navigator model to develop medical students’ ability to work as part of Interprofessional teams in patient-centered medical home practices; implementing a leadership curriculum that will cover all four years of medical school; focusing on the social and behavioral social determinants of health to provide a longitudinal and Interprofessional community-based experience for medical students; reorganizing their entire curriculum to utilize new active-learning models and create a mastery-oriented culture; and developing and implementing strategies to nurture excellent communicators who will use technology to support information exchange and empathetic interactions with individuals and diverse groups in multiple settings for preventive health, health maintenance, and health care delivery purposes.
The American Medical Association recognizes that no one single organization has all the answers; that it will take a collaborative approach to bring systemic change to the future of health care in this country.
More information on the consortium can be found at www.changemeded.org.