ChangeMedEd Initiative

21 more schools tapped to transform physician training

. 4 MIN READ

A panel of medical education leaders has selected 21 new members of the Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium to transform the way future physicians will be trained. Find out which schools were selected and what these transformations will look like.

Established in 2013, the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium has consisted of 11 founding members that have implemented novel projects to prepare future physicians to care for patients in the rapidly evolving health care environment. The 21 new member schools will build upon many of these programs and curricular models.

With the added schools, the new 32-school consortium will soon support training for an estimated 19,000 medical students who will one day care for 33 million patients each year.

“Our goal throughout this initiative has been to spread the robust work being done by our consortium to accelerate systemic change throughout medical education,” said AMA CEO James L. Madara, MD. “By tripling the number of schools participating in this effort, we know that we will be able to more quickly disseminate the consortium schools’ innovative curriculum models to even more schools—leading to the type of seismic shift that our medical education system needs so that our future physicians can better care for their patients.”

Each new consortium school will receive $75,000 over the next three years to advance the AMA’s innovative work aimed at transforming undergraduate medical education to better align with the health care system of the 21st century.

A national advisory panel evaluated and selected each school’s proposal based on criteria such as how the project would align with or have the potential to enhance the 11 founding schools’ work, as well as the project’s uniqueness and feasibility for implementation in other medical schools. The schools were selected from the 108 U.S. medical schools that applied to join the consortium. A total of 170 MD- and DO-granting institutions were eligible to apply.

Each school will help advance the work of the consortium around six key themes in medical education including:

1.  Developing flexible, competency-based pathways

2.  Teaching and/or assessing new content in health care delivery sciences

3.  Working with health care delivery systems in novel ways

4.  Making technology work to support learning and assessment

5.  Envisioning the master adaptive learner

6.  Shaping tomorrow’s leaders

The selected schools are:

  • A.T. Still University—School 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
  • Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine
  • 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 Medical Center
  • University of North Carolina School of Medicine
  •  University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences
  • University of Utah School of Medicine
  • University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine
  • University of Washington School of Medicine

“Together, the 32 schools will collectively work to quickly identify and widely share the best models for educational change to ensure our future physicians hit the ground running as soon as they graduate and begin caring for patients,” said Susan E. Skochelak, MD, AMA group vice president for medical education. “We believe that by working together, the crux of this work can be accomplished in the next five years, which will be a huge win for patients and the health of our nation.”

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