As technology undams a virtual flood of information for physicians, educators at Geisinger College of Health Sciences are finding innovative ways to teach medical students to harness both the power and the practical value of that health data.
“Physicians put a tremendous amount of effort into entering information into the EHR, and being able to see them begin to reap the rewards of that by being able to pull intelligence back out from the investment that they made is very gratifying,” Bruce Levy, MD, a pathologist and professor of pathology and informatics for the Geisinger College of Health Sciences, told the AMA. “This is really just one piece of the work we’re doing here at Geisinger to make the EHR a partner instead of an adversary.”
Geisinger is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Dr. Levy is also associate chief medical informatics officer and director of the clinical informatics fellowship program for Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger. He spoke at the AMA ChangeMedEd® 2025 national conference in Chicago about the evolution of the medical school’s health system science program and how Geisinger is teaching the next generation of physicians to use technology as a health care tool.
Physicians “need to be even better at being able to handle data [than ever before], because it's the only way we're going to be able to care for our patients as thoroughly and as deeply as we would like to,” Dr. Levy said of Geisinger’s work.
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.
Democratizing data
During his fellowship training in forensic pathology in New York City back in the early ’90s, Dr. Levy was struck by the wealth of information available—in the school’s locked library.
“On the wall were bookcases full of journal volumes going back almost 100 years, written in that long cursive writing that nobody does anymore with all the cases that had come through—who the people were, where they had lived, why they had died,” he said. “I remember sitting, flipping through it and thinking: All this information is locked up behind doors, where it does no good. We can do better than this.”
As time has passed, not only has health data become more accessible to physicians, but it has also increased dramatically in volume.
“When I was a kid, medicine was a physician and a nurse in an office that very frequently was attached to the physician's home,” Dr. Levy said. “There weren't these complex systems of care. There weren't thousands of laboratory tests. There wasn’t the explosion of information that we've had over the past few decades.”
With the influx of data, though, there has come a need to help physicians find a way to best leverage that technology.
Medical students can learn more with the AMA EHR Workflow Learning Series of modules that prepares them to leverage any EHR to improve their efficiency and effectiveness as they gain increasing responsibility in medical practices. This AMA Ed Hub™ series is an AMA members-only resource.
Practical, high-impact education
As part of a constant reimagining of the instruction of health system science at Geisinger—which Dr. Levy said the school calls “health system citizenship”—instructors overhauled a quality improvement session with first-year medical students. The new curriculum used Epic and its self-service reporting tool called SlicerDicer to give medical students access to deidentified real-world patient data.
In the first year of the new program, medical students looked at the deidentified records of patients with positive colorectal cancer screening test results using the at-home DNA test Cologuard. They studied both “those who did and did not have their follow-up colonoscopy to see if they could identify potential projects to try to close that care gap,” Dr. Levy said. In small groups, the students dug into the EHR data and submitted proposals on how to improve rates of follow-up colonoscopy, which remains the gold standard for colon-cancer screening.
“The student feedback was incredibly positive,” he said, and instructors were so pleased that in the next year of the project, they selected the three best ideas and coached the groups in presenting their plans to Geisinger’s quality leadership council.
“The quality people were thrilled,” Dr. Levy said. “The ideas were really good,” and though the ideas are not yet ready for implementation, the medical students “enjoyed the experience of being able to present at” a high level and getting a feeling that, “even in their first year, they're part of caring for patients already.”
As a result, Dr. Levy and his colleagues are moving the session earlier in the year and building on it, looking for ways to expand the curriculum to other parts of undergraduate and graduate medical education at Geisinger.
“We’re blending it into what they're doing so it becomes part of their day-to-day work,” Dr. Levy said, because medical students are “going to graduate, they're going to go into residencies and then into practice. They're going to be working in EHRs, and this is what they're going to be doing. And more importantly, this is what we need them to be doing.”
Explore other highlights from AMA ChangeMedEd® 2025, along with session slides, visual notetaking and more.
