NYU Medical School is catching up its curriculum with health care reform, thanks to a special grant from the American Medical Association. The AMA is awarding $1 million to 11 medical schools as part of its Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative.
The school's winning proposal will create a flexible three-year curriculum driven by de-identified patient data from the NYU network that will be used to recreate real-world clinical settings.
"This funding program will give us the opportunity to create a tight connection between the med student curriculum at NYU and the way that we are evolving how we deliver safe and efficient care," said Dr. Marc Triola, associate dean for educational informatics at NYU School of Medicine, to DOTmed News.
Triola hopes the new curriculum will help move medical school education away from the traditional, lecture-heavy format and toward a more tech-savvy and interactive approach.
In addition to making use of de-identified patient data, students will create an ePortfolio with a dashboard for tracking their progress during the program that can also be used after the student graduates.
The curriculum will be used as part of NYU's first of its kind three-year M.D. program, which allows students to choose their future residencies when beginning medical school. The program's first class of students starts this summer.
"The unique thing is that the students know what field they're going into from the start," said Triola. "So we can take this de-identified data from our clinical practice networks, and teach these students not only about the fundamentals of patients, but also how to manage a population of patients through the lens of the data."
Part of the initiative will be for successful schools to share best practices with other medical schools.
"We want to create med students who are poised to be leaders in this space," said Triola. "They're poised to have a true understanding about what health care reform is, or what health care reform will be 10 years from now. A future that could have care delivery models that we can't conceive of now."
