Despite the noise and groaning, medical school applications continue to grow, driven by many factors. However, the medical school education model dates back to the Flexner report issued in 1910.. Many are trying to address the challenges of how to train the biomedical research and practice workforce to win the 4th industrial revolution, but progress has been slow.

Medical educators will face 5 basic problems in the coming years:

DEMONSTRATING THE VALUE OF MEDICAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING

According to a new AAMC study, 76% of students graduate with debt. And while that percentage has decreased in the last few years, those who do borrow for medical school face big loans: the median debt was $192,000 in 2018. At private schools, 21% of students have debt of $300,000 or more. The average four-year cost for public school students is $243,902. For private school students, the cost is $322,767. Many medical students in debt marry other medical students in debt. Do the math and the implications of career and family planning, housing and specialty choice.

Some are questioning whether it is still worth being a doctor.

ACCOMMODATING THE MARKET DEMAND FOR NON-CLINICAL CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Medical students are forgoing residencies, practitioners are abbreviating their clinical careers, side gigs and hustles are hot and many want to create patient value other than seeing 20 a day for their entire career. Physician entrepreneurship is finally getting its rightful due, yet few medical schools offer education and training in it, let alone the business of medicine. There are few entrepreneurial medical schools and, arguably, there is a sick care innovation bubble.

Barriers persist:

1. Lack of education about how to get an idea to patients, particularly in the core areas of regulatory affairs, intellectual property, the legal environment, reimbursement, business development and building high performance teams.
2. Lack of seed stage money
3. Poor internal and external networks to find the right people for their startup or development teams
4. Poor mentoring platforms
5. Lack of social support networks
6. Poor relationships with policy and advocacy partners
7. Lack of a structured digital health clinical research infrastructure
8. Inability to find clinical care delivery partners who are willing and able to test digital health products and services
9. Significant barriers to integrating digital health products into the legacy EMR
10. Poor innovation culture, structure, process, leadership and incentives
11. Lack of promotion and tenure credit for academic entrepreneurs
12. Lack of recognition for medical edupreneurs
13. Poor entrepreneurial mindset
14. A toxic, anti-entrepreneurial culture of education and training
15. High switching and opportunity costs of pursuing a non-clinical career track
16. Ignorance about non-clinical career development opportunities
17. Difficulty matching qualified physician entrepreneurs with viable startups and scaleups

18. How to manage a gig economy portfolio

19. Understanding the tax and liability consequences of various compensation schemes

20. Risk management

DECLINING REVENUES FROM RESEARCH GRANTS, CLINICAL EARNINGS AND STATE SUPPORT AND A FAULTY BUSINESS MODEL

Major consolidation and the expansion of academic integrated delivery networks means the rich get richer and poor get poorer. NIH funding uncertainty is pervasive. Some states have withdrawn funding from their public medical schools. Reforms in clinical practice reimbursement will lead to decreasing revenues. Many schools are reaching out to create partnerships with industry with ethical and professional conduct threats. More are relying on philanthropreneurs to put their names on buildings. Many have repacked their technology transfer offices and rebranded them as innovation centers.

Here’s why there is a physician compensation bubble.

DEFINING NEW MARKET NEEDS DERIVED LEARNING OBJECTIVES AND CURRICULUM REFORM AND RESKILLING

U.S. companies are increasingly paying up to retrain workers as new technologies transform the workplace and companies struggle to recruit talent in one of the hottest job markets in decades.

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 0.54% is the latest example of a large employer committing to help its workers gain new skills. The online retailer said Thursday it plans to spend $700 million over about six years to retrain a third of its U.S. workforce as automation, machine learning and other technology upends the way many of its employees do their jobs.

We need to stop graduating knowledge technicians. Recruiting the traditional triple threat to lead departments is a dead model. Domain expertise needs to be supplemented with communication, creativity, collaboration and complex problem solving to address the social determinants of health and other wicked problems. Here are the principles of medical education reform. Free tuition won’t solve the problems.

The Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute outlines ‘trandisciplinarity’ as one of the ‘Ten Skills for the Future Workforce’ alongside the following: Sense-making, social intelligence, novel and adaptive thinking, cross-cultural competency, computational thinking, new-media literacy, design mindset, cognitive load management and virtual collaboration

Who is the chairperson of your Department of the Future and what are their qualifications?

Here’s how to create a culture of digital transformation.

FIXING THE TOXIC CULTURE OF MEDICAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING AND THE LACK OF DIVERSITY

How many more times do we need to read about physician burnout, stress, mental health issues and suicide? When will we fix how we recruit applicants and faculty to create a more diverse and inclusive talent pipeline?

Medical school graduates are now more racially diverse than before, but they’re still not representative of the general population, according to new research.

Higher education feeds the medical school pipeline and has its own problems that need to be fixed.

There are many parts to the contemporary economic bubble diagram and medical schools could be one of them is they don’t address these problems.