AMA expands initiative to transform medical education
The American Medical Association is continuing its effort to redesign undergraduate medical education to better align with the 21st century healthcare system.
Less than two years after the AMA launched its initiative to reshape medical education across the United States, the organization recently announced that it will provide funding for up to 20 additional medical schools to join the AMA’s “Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium.”
The consortium was created by the AMA in 2013 with an $11 million grant initiative to 11 of the country’s top medical schools. Each school received a $1 million grant over five years, and together they formed a consortium that is developing curriculum models to help medical students better prepare for delivering care in the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, according to AMA. The projects currently underway include models for student immersion within the healthcare system from Day 1 of medical school, and competency-based models enabling students to advance through medical school based on individualized learning plans.
As part of the second phase of the “Accelerating Change in Medical Education” initiative, the AMA is calling on medical schools to build upon and implement the education models created by the 11 founding consortium schools, as well as offer unique projects that can be shared with medical schools nationwide. The organization will provide $1.5 million over the next three years to fund up to 20 additional schools’ projects that support a significant redesign of undergraduate medical education.
Through a competitive grant process, a national advisory panel will evaluate proposals and select projects that incorporate one of the following themes:
- Developing flexible, competency-based pathways.
- Teaching and/or assessing new content in healthcare delivery science.
- Working with healthcare delivery systems in novel ways.
- Making technology work to support learning and assessment.
- Envisioning the master adaptive learner.
- Shaping tomorrow’s leaders.
Projects that do not fall under one of these themes but provide a valuable contribution to the consortium will also be considered, according to the AMA.
Over the course of the initiative, the AMA will continue to track and report on the progress of the medical schools’ collective work in order to identify and widely disseminate the best models for transformative educational change. The AMA will also continue to develop ways to collaborate with and incorporate feedback from additional medical schools.