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Dear Alumni/ae and Friends:
 At the recent annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges,
the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society hosted its centennial symposium.
Sam Their, M.D., former president of the Institute of Medicine and current
president of Partner’s Healthcare (the joint integrated health care venture
of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s
Hospital), recounted the organization’s history. He reminded the audience
that going back to the late 1800s, three medical schools — the University
of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan — had
a profound and lasting role in the creation of the modern medical university
as first embodied at Johns Hopkins. Here in Ann Arbor we carry on today’s
education of tomorrow’s physicians mindful of our storied tradition as
a leader in medical education for more than 150 years.
From time to time, it is critical that we assess our curriculum to judge whether
it best meets the needs of our prospective graduates. When revisions are necessary,
we are not hesitant to undertake them. In 1968, when I started school here,
we were taught with a new curriculum that emphasized cross-disciplinary learning.
In 1992, a major revision was unveiled with less emphasis on lecture, more
systems-based learning in the second year, and a pure pass-fail grading system
in the first year.
It became clear, however, that as medicine changed dramatically in the decade
of the 1990s, we needed to recognize that more and more of our patients were
being managed in ambulatory settings; that skills assessment was becoming as
important as factual recall; that physicians increasingly practiced in large
multi-specialty groups; that the Internet and electronic learning aids were
becoming more important; and that the fast pace of discovery meant we had to
teach our students more to think and problem-solve rather than present them
with lectures and endless facts to memorize.
A large faculty team worked for 18 months to craft a new curriculum, and our
entire faculty voted to initiate the course of study starting in August 2003.
The “new” curriculum is not a radical departure from the “old.” Rather,
it takes the solid curriculum we have today and builds upon it to further strengthen
the educational experience. Some highlights of the revisions include:
- the first two years will be fully systems-based in contrast to the
current second year only;
- clinical experiences will be introduced earlier, increasing patient focus
and contextual learning;
- M2s will be required to pass a clinical skills exam to progress to inpatient
care;
- clerkships will start in April of the second year so that the required
rotations will finish in time for students to have more elective experiences
prior to
choosing a specialty field;
- a longitudinal family health experience will be introduced, helping integrate
genetic, environmental and sociocultural influences on health;
- students will be asked to produce a scholarly product prior to graduation.
Many other innovations have been made, and some of these are described in
detail in this issue of Medicine
at Michigan.
We have the privilege of training some of the finest students in the country.
They are so capable and so well-prepared for medical school that they would
probably turn out to be outstanding physicians no matter what style of teaching
we employ. But medicine is changing at a rapid rate, and as educators we have
the responsibility to keep pace with this change. Michigan has always been
a leader in medical education. With this new curriculum, we make clear our
desire to remain a leader for decades to come.
Sincerely,
Allen S. Lichter, M.D.
Dean
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