There’s a lot of buzz around precision education in medicine and for good reason. By leveraging data and technology—including augmented intelligence (AI), also known as artificial intelligence—precision education tailors learning experiences to individual needs, delivering the right education to the right learner at the right time. It is widely considered the future of learning across the medical education continuum.
But if precision education is to succeed in reshaping how physicians learn, how they practice and how they care for their patients, medical educators will need to identify and address potential risks, right from the get-go.
That means now. Earlier this year, the AMA launched its Transforming Lifelong Learning Through Precision Education Grant Program, a $12 million project featuring 11 projects, each funded at $1.1 million over four years, involving more than 80 institutions.
Each project is unique and the program addresses three goals for advancing precision education in the health professions:
- Catalyzing novel tech-facilitated assessments.
- Addressing competency domains beyond medical knowledge.
- Generating meaningful personalization of training.
Learn about the grant recipients and their projects.
The stakes are high, reflected by the fact that organizations with oversight roles, such as the American Board of Medical Specialties and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, are involved.
“We're conscious of the fact that this is not easy,” said Kimberly D. Lomis, MD, vice president of medical education innovations at the AMA. “Indeed, if done poorly—if we launch into projects blindly and they are experienced by learners in a negative way—the whole concept will fall apart. One of our goals, both before we awarded the grants and since, has been to make sure that the grantees are thinking carefully about potential pitfalls and pursuing this work with intention.”
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors. That includes recently launching the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI to give physicians a powerful voice in shaping how AI and other digital tools are harnessed to improve the patient and clinician experience.
Leveraging big data for med ed
During the grant-application process, Dr. Lomis and her team at the AMA required prospective grantees to be specific about what could go wrong in leveraging big data and AI in novel ways.
“There was a required field in the application where they had to tell us what they were worried about,” she said. “And in our information sessions, we told people we were serious: If you didn't have something in there, you would be downgraded.”
She and her team then created a thematic summary of all of those concerns and layered them on top of their own. Four domains of anticipated challenges emerged:
- Data and technical issues.
- Responsible design and deployment.
- Engagement of learners and educators.
- Organizational culture.
Earlier this spring, the AMA team pushed “to figure out what we could do to mitigate some of these concerns,” Dr. Lomis said, adding that one step was to put in place committees with oversight for routine evaluation. “For example, if you're using an AI tool to evaluate communication skills from ambient scribe capture, what's the process for reviewing the performance of that tool and how it's functioning? What is the rapid-cycle improvement process in place for learners or faculty members engaging with it to share if they're not sure it's landing right?
“We also had a panel of learners who ran their own session around how to build for trust. We really believe in the notion of coproducing with learners.”
Learn more about what precision education is and how it’s advancing medical education.
Expanding precision education’s reach
Another, broader concern about the program is its reach.
“Ultimately, the goal here is to create an approach to precision education that is not dependent on being a high-powered academic medical center,” said Kevin Heckman, director of product development at the AMA. “Otherwise, you've made something that doesn't really change the way people take care of patients.”
In other words, the knowledge has to be democratized. In fact, it has to become ubiquitous.
“We have to figure out the challenges across a variety of settings, come up with approaches to solve them and then share those approaches out to the broader medical education community,” he said.
Think big, not fast
Heckman also wants the medical education community to challenge its assumptions about what to expect of precision education.
“I think one misconception of precision education is that we're talking about using AI in a way that it replaces human assessment, that the learner's experience is strictly with an AI tool,” he said. “AI should assist physicians, not replace them. It is there to open up bottlenecks in education, to tackle big data sets that cannot easily be addressed.”
A more subtle hazard to be aware of, he added, is thinking too small, of seeking to create a medical education system that just runs faster.
“Our ambition should be a lot bigger than creating a more efficient medical education system,” Heckman said, citing workforce issues like the shortage of primary care physicians as prime targets for precision education. “We should strive to transform what healthcare looks like in the U.S.”
This requires taking a broad view of where precision education can be applied.
“My hope is that this process extends from pre-med to retirement,” he said. “And while most of the projects that we’re working with right now are in medical school and residency, we have a couple with implications for practicing physicians as well. We have the opportunity to solve longstanding problems across the entirety of the medical education journey.”
The AMA ChangeMedEd® initiative has inspired a community of innovation in medical education that works collaboratively to create a workforce best prepared to meet the needs of patients and communities. Through an investment in—and collaboration with—a wide range of partners across the medical education continuum and throughout the health care ecosystem, the AMA is driving change to reduce barriers to lifelong learning, advance health equity and improve patient outcomes.
