Each month, the American Medical Association (AMA) highlights institutions that are part of the AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium to showcase their work with the consortium and innovations in medical education.
In its latest edition of ChangeMedEd Monthly, the AMA asked University of Michigan Associate Dean for Medical Student Education Rajesh S. Mangrulkar, M.D., to talk about his work with the consortium and his thoughts on medical education.
Dr. Mangrulkar answered several questions about the U-M’s work in the curriculum, the transformation of medical education, a vision for the future, and other items, including:
Our project fully transformed our medical student education program through a deliberate change process built upon curricular components that support student-centered objectives. Our ultimate goal was to develop and implement a program that graduated medical students who can provide optimal care for patients and serve as leaders and change agents in improving the health care system. We expect graduates of our new program to improve the health of their patients and the community through service, leadership, education, and science. I was fortunate to describe our vision for our AMA project as a TED talk at a TEDMED event in Chicago.
To accomplish this primary goal, our project involved a phenomenal set of teams which included over 300 faculty and staff, and additionally nearly 150 medical students, all working on the development of a new educational program that addresses the needs of a changing healthcare system. Our project vision required a complete reformulation of the structure, format, and context of medical education for the UMMS student. The new program is competency-based, flexible and oriented to the learner, paying particular attention to the longitudinal spectrum of professional development. It contains 2 phases: a foundational ‘Trunk’ phase and an individualized ‘Branches’ phase. There are 5 additional longitudinal elements: Leadership training, inter-professional education, scholarly concentrations (‘Paths of Excellence’), Coaching, and the M-Home (a longitudinal learning community which promotes connection, authenticity and support).
Simultaneously, we invested heavily in a project evaluation plan and a ‘learning outcomes dashboard’ that built upon robust educational assessment and evaluation initiatives to measure the impact of this new program on student, institutional, and health systems-oriented outcomes.
In parallel, we led a small team to work with the AMA to develop “Case Studies in Medical Education Transformation”, supported by a grant from the AMA, which describe the difficult stories of change at 6 of the consortium schools through structured cases with an accompanying facilitator’s guide. These cases help illustrate the foundational principles of change management and have been used at ACE Consortium meetings as part of workshops with participants on how schools are implementing their projects.
Read the entire interview HERE.