Good grades in medical school and excellent test scores on a licensing exam were once the main criteria for evaluating who would or wouldn’t excel as a doctor. But today’s physicians need more than those skills to thrive in health care. “They’ve got to know how to talk to people,” said Michael R. Williams, president of University of North Texas Health Science Center. They also must be empathetic and comfortable receiving feedback and working with a team to deliver care, according to Williams and other medical school experts at the U.S. News & World Report Hospital of Tomorrow Conference in the nation’s capital 2014. Williams was joined by Stephen K. Klasko, president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health System, and Gail R. Wilensky, a senior fellow at Project HOPE, which provides medical training and health education in several countries. Tim Smart, executive editor for news at U.S. News & World Report, moderated the panel on how medical schools and graduate medical education must change to better meet the needs of patients. Panelists also discussed why other institutions, such as the accrediting bodies for medical school, must also change for there to be a fundamental improvement in how healthcare is delivered. “We can’t make incremental change,” Williams said. Key points included: “If you really want to change the way physicians practice going forward you have to look at the full continuum,” said Wilensky. “You have to look at undergraduate medical education which, unfortunately, does not receive the kind of financial support that graduate medical education does.” The federal contribution to graduate medical education is $15 billion, she said. In a study that included responses from doctors who had practiced for three years or less, many said they were not taught how to do health care financing or to negotiate, said Klasko, a physician who also received his MBA from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Accrediting bodies for medical institutions greatly influence when and how change happens within medicine. “In many ways the higher ed accreditation system is the tail that wags the dog. And unfortunately it’s behind the times where we need to go,” Williams said. Williams suggests schools reevaluate the settings in which students learn. “The future is not big auditoriums,” he said. “It’s small group learning. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed because of the volume of change that needs to occur, said Wilensky, but “there are a lot of bright spots.” Simulation trainings for doctors is one example, she said. Thinking differently about how to train different kinds of doctors is also a necessary step in this process, Williams said. All of the panelists seemed to agree that change must happen in multiple areas to help students succeed. Source
