With the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the environment of medical education is changing.

Digital transformation of the medical education environment requires “disruptive innovation” in teaching medical school students, a health expert said.

Jason Hwang, one of the co-authors of the book “The Innovator’s Prescription,” published in 2009, speaks on disruptive innovation in healthcare at a recent forum in Seoul.
Jason Hwang, one of the co-authors of the book “The Innovator’s Prescription,” published in 2009, speaks on disruptive innovation in healthcare at a recent forum in Seoul.

Medical schools can consider shifting large-class lectures, which delivers a vast amount of knowledge in limited time efficiently, to a new form of education that integrates digital transformation to enable remote teaching, he said.

Jason Hwang, one of the co-authors of the book “The Innovator’s Prescription,” published in 2009, spoke on disruptive innovation in healthcare and medical school education in the future at a recent forum in Seoul.

“The Innovator’s Prescription” was written by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen and his co-authors. The book introduces a disruptive innovation theory to identify the problems of the U.S. healthcare system and suggests strategies to increase quality and lower costs.

In 2010, The Korean Doctors’ Weekly, a sister paper of Korea Biomedical Review, published the Korean language version of “The Innovator’s Prescription.” Since then, Korean healthcare professionals have also searched for innovative ways to reduce medical costs and increase accessibility.

“The Innovator’s Prescription” suggests disruptive innovation for changing medical education. Although the book came out 12 years ago, it still provides blueprints for future medical education to nurture doctors who will dedicate themselves to humans suffering from diseases, lower healthcare costs, and increase quality.

“The ‘Innovator’s Prescription’ predicted not only how our medical education will change but how healthcare jobs will change,” Hwang said. “The role of clinicians is evolving much faster than we ever imagined.”

Advancements in remote patient care and home diagnostic devices have radically accelerated for the past several years, he went on to say. “We have to think if we can catch up with those advancements by utilizing digital technologies such as AI in medical education.”

Hwang brought up the history of U.S. medical education to explain how disruptive innovation should occur for future medical education.

The Flexner Report, a book on medical education in the U.S. and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910, helped establish the “2+2” curriculum to teach essential medicine and clinical training for two years each.

However, this kind of education was not beneficial for all medical students. Some could not use the knowledge memorized for two years in clinical practice. Others were so confused that they did not even know why they studied primary medicine.

According to “The Innovator’s Prescription,” the science curriculum and clinical practice should be combined with the five “execution rules” of Toyota so that students can learn something and use it immediately.

Students should receive clinical training in small groups. The book said that all the student groups should be able to do a rotation in the same department to maintain learning consistency.

Toyota’s five execution rules consist of activities, connections, pathways, and two improvement steps.

According to Toyota’s rules, students learn best when they immediately use what they have learned. The book said that students who were verified to understand the knowledge in each stage should be allowed to move on to the next step.

Plus, telemedicine could be used for medical education to maximize efficiency, just like it changed the patient care environment, Hwang explained.

“The best clinician may not come from our traditional medical environment,” he said. “An important competency, just as important as a traditional clinician’s, is the ability to understand and handle technologies like AI.”

Hwang noted that people had witnessed a dramatic growth of telemedicine models in the past several years. Doctors are using one-on-one care and finding out how to use mobile applications to manage many patients, he said.

“This is similar to the change in the environment of elementary school education.”

He found it encouraging to see what’s happening in telemedicine and virtual classrooms in the Covid-19 pandemic era, he said.

He added that disruptive innovation in medical education would create new ways to access more healthcare services.

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