Preparing Professionals to Serve in a Reformed Health Care System

As our elected officials craft legislation that could transform US health care into a more equitable system that rewards high-value and coordinated care, academic leaders must embrace the challenge of training medical and health care professionals to serve successfully in this new environment. During the past few decades, professional associations and organizations have called for health profession education reform, asserting that current programs inappropriately emphasize memorization of scientific knowledge over teamwork, clinical judgment, practical skills, and character/values development.1,2 Indeed, students in health professions currently are educated in a highly competitive environment that fosters individual knowledge, responsibility, and autonomy. After completing training, most of today's physicians enter private practice, where the world is often centered around them. However, in a high-quality, integrated health care system, the world must be centered on the patient. In the essay “American Medical Education 100 Years After the Flexner Report,” Cooke et al3 said that “the moral dimension of medical education requires that students and residents acquire a crucial set of professional values and qualities, at the heart of which is the willingness to put the needs of the patient first.” In April 2009, more than 150 national leaders gathered at Mayo Clinic's site in Rochester, MN, for the National Symposium on Health Care and Medical Education Reform to build consensus on how to realign US education programs to create a workforce capable of realizing this patient-centered vision. Participants acknowledged the mismatch between how professionals are currently being educated and the needs of society. Through discussion and submission and ranking of reform principles, participants identified 3 priorities for education reform: culture, curriculum, and financing.