Today Eric Topol is keynoting the American Association of Medical Colleges in San Francisco. If you haven’t read The Creative Destruction of Medicine, it should be required reading for anyone looking for a lens into the future. For academic leadership to ignore this book’s message is to put our profession on the fast track to irrelevance.
As medicine advances faster than our ability to keep up, Topol’s presence at the AAMC is important. While there’s lots of talk about what needs to happen to get doctors to adopt new tools and workflows, it starts with the way we make doctors. And we must start with every medical educator understanding Topol’s perspective.
On my flight from Houston, I got to thinking what I might want to get across if I were addressing the AAMC. While I may never be privileged enough to keynote the nation’s elite medical leadership, here are a few points that I might make concerning the future of medicine and medical education.
Offer the freedom to innovate. The restraints of educational regulation hobble our capacity to reshape medical education for the future. Regulatory bodies must realize their role in allowing and facilitating change.
Shift the culture. Change the habit of lockstep thinking. Put an end to the culture of permission that keeps young doctors and medical students from taking on the bigger problems in medicine. Promote and pay those creating real change in the way diagnose and treat patients and train doctors. Punish those who put empty papers into print in the interest of self-promotion. Reward the kind of failure that moves us closer to where we need to be.
Make leaders. Doctors are trained to listen, memorize and follow. Make doctors who create and lead.
Promote public thinking. Mandate that teachers and faculty make their thinking and their processes public and collaborative. Require students to make and shape ideas. Replace telephone book length CVs with living platforms that demonstrate remarkable thinking. Promote as leaders those motivated to move ideas within the global community of health providers.
Cultivate digital faculty. Hire teachers who understand and are willing to adopt and fashion the tools of post-analog medicine. Replace those who don’t. Hire and adopt the mindset of the early innovators in digital medicine. Promote faculty who are moving the chains. Reward progressive thinking. Squash the culture of fear. Cultivate the energy, mindset and passion of medicine’s founders in a way that turns medicine upside down.
Uproot the curriculum. Dated curricula breeds dated doctors. Recognize that what worked for students in 1910 won’t work for your students.
Turn the amphitheater into a museum. Or keep it as a charming relic of the way students once learned. Recognize that in 2012 medical school lecture halls are increasingly empty. The days of sitting and watching the learned men have come and gone. Teaching is no longer one-way. Knowledge is networked. Learning is collaborative.
If we train students like it’s the 20th century we will breed physicians unable to function in a modern world. We must replace or prepare to be replaced.
I’ll see you at the Moscone Center.
Be sure to mark your 2013 calendar to hear Eric Topol at Millennial Medicine – Knowledge Design for an Age of Digital Disruption in Houston.