Dean’s Report FY24
The magnetic power of Harvard Medical School’s educational programs pull in exceptionally skilled teachers and ambitious learners from around the world. Our case-based curriculum model for medical and dental students continues to serve as a gold standard for medical education, and the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program trains the best and brightest to lead tomorrow’s clinical discoveries as physician-scientists.
To maintain our excellence, we must enforce high standards for our medical students, including in their clinical endeavors. Bernard Chang, the Daniel D. Federman, M.D. Professor of Neurology and Medical Education at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and HMS, now in his second year as dean for medical education, is leading efforts to return to more thorough assessments of student knowledge and skill acquisition. The intent is that our graduates’ impressive command of medicine will distinguish them in their residency programs and with their future patients.
We are committed to rigorously examining the outcomes of our educational practices so that we can continue to improve how we train the next generation of Harvard doctors. Indeed, contemporary medical education requires placing greater emphasis on skills such as social awareness, professionalism, cultural humility, and leadership so that students who graduate from HMS are not only lifelong learners but also the most capable and compassionate clinicians, scientists, and humanists.
Our graduate education programs continued to lead in scientific ingenuity, intellectual rigor, and community building while increasing their reach and selectivity. For example, the Harvard PhD Program in Neuroscience accepted just 4 percent of applicants.
More than 600 students are now enrolled in our master’s degree programs. The most recent, the master of science in media, medicine, and health, has come to distinguish itself nationally through its focus on evidence-based storytelling. Four master’s programs have been running remotely since 2020, reaching some of our most international cohorts and offering a model for providing robust online degree programs. New master of medical sciences degree programs in clinical research and in therapeutic sciences are set to welcome their first students in fall 2025 — an example of injecting therapeutics competencies into our educational mission.
We took further steps to prepare students to lead in employing AI to meet the public health goals of the next half century. As of August 2024, all entering medical students in our Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology take a monthlong class on AI in medicine once they complete the first-week Introduction to the Profession class. As far as we know, HMS is the only medical school in the country that starts with an entire course on this subject.
AI has begun to enrich teaching and learning as well. Students in our Pathways MD program will be experimenting with large language models as automated tutors to augment classroom learning. Faculty and staff are using AI tools to analyze medical student performance on consolidation exercises in basic science classrooms and to more efficiently synthesize narrative feedback from students into assessments of how our hospital-based clerkships are performing. AI can help residents identify gaps in students’ training and develop individualized clinical education plans. Faculty who teach PhD students are exploring the value of generative AI to revamp experimental design practice and create personalized learning experiences.
Classes began this fall for the new Artificial Intelligence in Medicine PhD track, led by Zak Kohane, the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics and head of the Department of Biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, and Sebastian Schneeweiss, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The initial class includes seven PhD students.
The Office for External Education debuted HMX online learning courses in natural language processing (NLP) and AI in medical image interpretation. The NLP course was offered to the entire HMS community for free, and nearly 850 learners took advantage, raising our collective proficiency in this burgeoning area. The office offered a new program on AI in health care for business leaders and developed an accredited continuing education course on AI in medicine for clinicians.
In June, the office celebrated 10 years of providing innovative learning opportunities to help health care professionals, business leaders at all levels, and patients and families worldwide develop their potential to shape the future of medicine and health care. A new addition was the online learning program HealthXcelerate, which provides a comprehensive, patient-centric understanding of the U.S. health care system in a global context. And more than 10 million people visit the Harvard Health Publishing website each month for trusted information.
Excellence attracts excellence in a virtuous cycle. Our acceptance rate for applicants to the MD class of 2028 was 3.2 percent, and 75 percent of accepted students matriculated here — the highest yield of any medical school in the country. Once again, we welcomed a class of individuals who have demonstrated exceptional scholarly achievement and tremendous promise.
We remain motivated to raise philanthropy to help us realize the dream of debt-free medical education for our students.