Despite the nearly universal use of health IT tools in medical practice today, the majority of med students make it through their medical school experience without having much exposure to such tools. In an effort to change this, the AMA is launching a new textbook designed to give med students at least a basic exposure to critical health IT topics.
To create the textbook, the AMA collaborated with its 32-school Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium. The collaboration generated a new “pillar” of medical education it dubs Health Systems Science, which members concluded should be taught alongside of basic and clinical sciences. This follows a recent study by the AMA concluding that its practicing physician members are quite interested in digital health.
In addition to covering key business concepts such as value in healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, teamwork/team science and leadership, socio-ecological determinants of health, healthcare policy and health care economics, the textbook also addresses clinical informatics and population health. And an AMA press release notes that many schools within the Consortium will soon use the textbook with the students, including Penn State College of Medicine and Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School.
The Brown program, for example, which received a $1 million AMA grant to support the change in this curriculum, has created a Primary Care-Population Medicine program. The program awards graduates both a Doctor of Medicine and a Master of Science in Population Medicine. The AMA describes this program is the first of its kind in the US.
It’s interesting to see that the AMA has stepped in and funded this project, partly because it seems to have been ambivalent about key health IT tools in the past, but partly because I expect to see vendors doing something like this. Honestly, now that I think about it, I’m surprised there isn’t a Cerner grant for the most promising clinical informatics grad, say, or the eClinicalWorks prize sponsoring a student’s medical training. Maybe the schools have rules against such things.
Actually, this is a rare situation in which I think getting vendors involved might be a good idea. Of course, med students wouldn’t benefit particularly from being trained exclusively on one vendor’s interface, but I imagine schools could organize regular events in which med school students had a chance to learn about different vendors’ platforms and judge the strengths and weaknesses of each on their own.
I guess what I’m saying is that while obtaining an academic understanding of health IT tools is great, the next step is to have med students get their hands on a wide variety of health IT tools and play with them before they’re on the front lines. That being said, adding pop health any clinical informatics is a step in the right direction
This is quite interesting. One time I was asked to teach a class of PAs about EHR and healthcare IT. While a few of them found it interesting, there wasn’t a serious interest because most of them were so overwhelmed by all their other course work that was going to be on the test that they didn’t care too much.
I think it’s unreasonable to think that a medical school would teach more than one EHR. Maybe they could do 2, but they don’t have time to really do more. Not to mention the expertise.