Guest posting by Emile Gleeson
Today, while medical school continues to prepare students with the medical knowledge that they need to become successful doctors, it isn’t giving them the other types of knowledge required by the medical profession in this day and age. At this point, technology has become deeply integrated into the lives of both doctors and patients, but its integration into the medical profession and patient care has been hindered by the lack of medical school courses addressing this major component of modern medicine. While getting older doctors to adapt to and use the newest medical technology will always be a bit of a struggle, we can easily alleviate the stress and burden of new doctors learning to deal with medical technologies by better integrating this aspect of the medical profession into the standard medical school training curriculum.
Luckily, many medical schools are beginning to catch on and integrate elective courses on digital medicine as an option for their medical students, but this isn’t going to be enough (Pelletier 2014). In order to fully prepare students for successful futures as medical professionals medical schools, and other medical professional schools, need to fully integrate medical technology/digital medicine courses into their standard required curricula. I realize that getting medical schools to change their standard curricula will be an uphill battle, but I believe that it is an important one that is worth our attention, time, and effort. We need to be producing new doctors that are fully capable of using today’s technology in the most efficient way possible to improve patient communication and outcomes. Improving the technological training offered in medical school could also help reduce post-medical school training time for new doctors, since they would already be better equipped to use whichever technologies are used by the hospital/practice that they choose to work at. By adding just one or two technology courses to the typical medical school curriculum, we can save our healthcare system money and time down the road as well as increase positive patient outcomes. A change of this magnitude will surely take much time to be implemented, if it ever is at all, but even in the meantime, medical students at those schools which do offer technology courses as electives should be strongly encouraged to take these courses. While taking neonatology may sound more impressive to a medical student that taking digital health, the digital health course will likely have a much greater pay off down the road.
Sources:
Pelletier, Stephen G., “Technology in Academic Medicine: Integrating Digital Literacy into Medical Education.” AAMC. American Association of Medical Colleges, Jul/Aug 2014. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.