Panelists, from left: Nancy Andrews, Allen Spiegel, Deborah German and Valerie Montgomery Rice. Image: Brown Dog Studio
At the decade-old University of Central Florida College of Medicine in Orlando, students are getting roused from bed by 3 a.m. emergency calls from virtual patients requiring their immediate attention.
The “patients,” who students follow over the course of their virtual lives, are part of a cutting edge technology used to teach students about the realities of being a physician.
Cultural competence is also part of the new HMS Pathways curriculum.
In Atlanta, a path toward a career in medicine might start in a kindergarten classroom at a local elementary school that has been adopted by the Morehouse School of Medicine as part of its commitment to building a pipeline to the health care and science professions for students underrepresented in medicine.
The new MedX program at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, provides a full interface between medicine and engineering, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York got a shot of financial adrenaline last year when it merged with the Montefiore Health System.
Deans of these institutions, all graduates of Harvard Medical School, spoke at an HMS Alumni Day Symposium on June 3 about the challenges and opportunities facing medical schools today and in the future.
Addressing future needs
While they all told their own individual, unique stories of how their institutions are planning for the future, the similarities were stark.
They all struggle, they said, with trying to address a growing need for primary care physicians and to develop adequate resources for cutting edge research in an era when government funding continues to be reduced, even as medical and biomedical research practices are rapidly advancing.
The integration of evolving technology into medical curriculums, and the practice of medicine, with an emphasis on clinical experience over lectures is also a continuing imperative at all schools, they said.
Attracting a mix of students—and providing opportunities to learn and then practice in a truly diverse environment—is also very much on the minds of the deans.
Diversity matters
“Diversity does matter,” said Morehouse School of Medicine President and Dean Valerie Montgomery Rice, HMS Class of 1987.
At Morehouse, Rice said, the school takes very seriously its mission to “increase the diversity of the health professional and scientific workforce” with an elementary school program and other initiatives aimed at giving all students a level angle from which to see.
Cultural competence is also part of the new HMS Pathways curriculum, something Rice said she was very proud to see.
Attracting diverse medical school classes—with men and women of different races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures and beliefs—and teaching students to be aware of the needs of every community they may someday serve are important factors in educating physicians who will lead the profession in the future, the deans said.
About five years ago, Duke’s medical school began a special scholarship program with its own distinct curriculum as a way to develop such leaders and better address community health issues, according to Dean Nancy Andrews, HMS Class 1984.
The Primary Care Leadership Track at Duke awards scholarships to students who commit to careers in primary care “to produce change agents in community health. And this has been a great joy for us, and I think, a great success,” Andrews said.
Providing improved health care in underserved communities is also part of the Albert Einstein College of Medicineʼs mission, according to Allen Spiegel, HMS Class of 1971, the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean.
The Einstein College of Medicine, located in the Bronx, is in one of the poorest urban counties in the country, according to Spiegel, who said it “is certainly underserved and a great challenge.”
Keeping up with technology
Part of that challenge, he said, is having the money to resist stagnation and maintain cutting-edge research facilities, technology and education, something that Spiegel said was a motivating factor is his institution’s merger with the Montefiore Medical Center in September of 2015.
“In that one fell swoop, we shifted from being a stand-alone medical school with no clinical revenue etcetera to being in this fully integrated model,” he said.
At the Central Florida College of Medicine, Vice President for Medical Affairs and Dean Deborah German, HMS Class of 1976, said that because she had the opportunity to build an institution from scratch, technology has played a major part in her vision of what a 21st century medical school should look like.
“The goal here is to do things that we can only do better with technology,” she said.
For example, German said, anatomy class at HMS in the 1970s, when she attended, was in a basement classroom. “It smelled, and there were tables with all these dead bodies on them, and we were there until 2 or 3 in the morning, and I felt like my first year of medical school was like a year in hell,” she said.
At Central Florida, she said, there are still cadavers in the top-floor anatomy lab, but instructors also use CT scans; there are Anatomage Tables and high definition TV screens so all the students can see what’s happening.
“The ways that student are learning today… the millennials, the digital natives; itʼs just a totally different way of interacting with reality, and our medical education has to evolve to encompass that,” said HMS Dean Jeffrey S. Flier.
