Tech Savvy Fluff from Medical Schools and the AMA

Here’s a fluff piece for you:

The first graduating classes from some of the 32 medical schools to participate in the American Medical Association’s pioneering curriculum modernization initiative are now ready to take their tech savvy to hospitals and practices nationwide.

Really?  I wonder if people of real significance in history ever said they were “pioneering” anything?  Anyway, let’s see what makes them so special:

ACME was launched back in 2013 with the goal of helping “close gaps in readiness for practice,” said Susan Skochelak, MD, group vice president of medical education at AMA, aiming to educate students in the information technology, techniques and value-based philosophies that have come to define healthcare in the 21st Century.

At the time, a recent poll had shown that only 64 percent of medical school programs even allowed students to get hands-on experience with electronic health records.

“When you talk to people who are hiring in the major health systems or you talk to graduates, what they’ll say is they really are not prepared. They don’t know how to manage panels of patients; they don’t fully even necessarily know what to do with an EHR,” Skochelak told Healthcare IT News at the time.

This is called out-of-touch with reality.  Manage panel of patients?  How about learning to treat patients individually?  And who doesn’t know what to do with an EHR?  In fact, each place you go has a different EHR.  You have to learn the idiosyncrasies of each one.  It really isn’t that hard to learn but they are almost all built to satisfy the insurance companies and hospitals but not the patients.

The curricula costs $12.5 million in grants from AMA and they are putting 19,000 medical students through it. Wow.  How about using that money to create MORE residencies so some of these medical students can become doctors instead of ending up being a scribe? Oh, wait, now I get it.  This is perfect training for some of them.

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