




With regards to specific teaching activities:

How might school education change in terms of virtual learning?


Will student requirements to graduate/take board exams change?

Students will still need to pass two computerized board exams to graduate and a third to become licensed by the local state medical board. The national boards did suspend a clinical exam for 12 to 18 months because it required direct interaction with standardized patient actors and travel to a very limited number of testing sites. Therefore, students won’t need it for graduation, but will still need it for later licensure.

Do you anticipate the types of courses for students to change?

Given that COVID-19 has become the medical event of our lifetime, we have already seen more schools offer coursework in infectious disease, pandemics, public health, and disaster preparedness. Students are also getting more training on how to interview and communicate with patients digitally as telemedicine rapidly becomes a new normal in healthcare.

What else might change in medical school education that isn’t on this list that should be included?

We think that the pandemic has exposed a major flaw in the medical education system where individual schools often create and maintain a custom but commonly taught curriculum despite having limited resources. Instead of reinventing the wheel, schools can use off the shelf curricular resources for commonly accepted core competencies and allow the faculty to focus on high-value teaching activities.

Conversely, we also believe that there is an opportunity for schools to develop curriculum in their areas of expertise and distribute it to others as part of a shared curricular ecosystem and, therefore, lowering the cost and increasing the accessibility of education for all, especially in underserved regions of the world.

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