The Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium: Bolstering the Alignment of Medical Education and Practice

The American Medical Association Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative aims to transform medical education through a community of innovation focused on shared themes:

1. Developing new methods for teaching and/or assessing key competencies for medical students and to foster methods to create more flexible, individualized learning plans.
2. Promoting exemplary methods to achieve patient safety, performance improvement and patient-centered, team-based care.
3. Improving medical students’ understanding of the health care system and health care financing.
4. Optimizing the learning environment.

This collective of 32 medical schools, impacting over 20,000 students, has strengthened the alignment of medical education with the needs of the evolving health care system through several collaborative efforts to be shared in this presentation.

Consortium members articulated Health System Science as the third pillar of medical education, complementing basic and clinical science. Explicit training in systems thinking, teamwork, patient safety, quality improvement, value, policy and advocacy has been incorporated via early, meaningful student roles in the system and applied interprofessional learning experiences. Student-led quality initiatives strengthen self-efficacy as systems citizens through tangible contributions to system improvement.

The Master Adaptive Learner framework provides structure for juggling the demands of continual learning in the context of one’s daily work. The ability to create actionable plans to address personal learning needs that are identified in the course of delivering care is essential to support the vision for the “learning health care system,” in which all learners work, and all workers learn.

Competency-based Assessment elevates essential abilities such as teamwork and communication earlier in medical school. Feedback from peers, interprofessional team members and patients enhance the identification of individual performance trends. This honors diverse abilities among members of the workforce, and targeted coaching is leveraged to bolster all the skills demanded by a dynamic health care system.