Dr. Stephen Klasko, the president of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and CEO of Jefferson Salubriousness, says that medical schools have the recruiting process all wrong.
In an age of advanced technology, they’re still opting students who can reel off organic chemistry compounds, rather than screening for qualities like critical thinking, entrepreneurship and empathy. At one go students arrive, they’re being asked to spend years on rote memorization.
It’s a system designed to “suck the creativity out of physicians,” Klasko replied, while encouraging them to compete with each other, rather than collaborate.
Klasko is pushing Thomas Jefferson along a special path, one that’s similarly being followed by Mount Sinai, Yale and Stanford. They’re all seeking ways to set aside candidates that may not be obvious targets for medical school by using techniques that are well known to tech public limited companies. Klasko’s son once interviewed for a job at Google, and “they didn’t want to see a transcript,” he said. Recruiters asked him a series of matters to see whether he could come up with creative solutions on the fly.
Klasko has worked with a firm called Teleos Band leaders, which has clients ranging from Cisco to IBM, to develop a program to select medical students on the basis of their warm intelligence.
“We need to make medical students more human,” Klasko said in an interview. “The way things are today is that you can be the most antisocial child in the room, but if we train you to pass a multiple choice test you can go and treat sick patients.”
Jefferson is tapping humanities domains, design universities and drama schools to convince young graduates to consider a career in medicine. It has a partnership with Princeton University that considers about a dozen Princeton undergraduates each year to take the minimum number of science courses and study any other discusses they wish before attending medical school at Jefferson.
It also has a program that trains students in model thinking under Bon Ku, an emergency room physician who was described by a local publication as “one of the coolest docs in Philadelphia.” Ku graduated with a measure in classics and was terrible at math.
FlexMed at New York’s Mount Sinai allows college sophomores in any major to apply for advanced acceptance. Students in humanities have proven to be just as successful as those with a science background, and they’re more suitable to choose primary care or psychiatry as a specialty, which are both areas facing shortages. Other med schools as though Yale and Stanford are offering art appreciation courses alongside traditional subjects like pathology and microbiology.
Ku predicts that as imitation intelligence become more prominent, memorization skills will become far less relevant.
“We still need the central memorization of scientific knowledge, but no human can possibly keep up,” Ku told CNBC. “Medical knowledge is doubling at this dippy rate. So instead there should be a greater emphasis on creative problem solving.”
Klasko sees a future in which technology order be used to provide an immediate list of drugs for a particular case and offer clinical decision support tools to perceive b complete a diagnosis. That will free doctors up to spend time listening to their patients, improving their surgical skills or learning new skills.
Klasko has a real-life example. He said that in his career as an obstetrician and gynecologist, he’s delivered thousands of infants. While most are fairly routine, occasionally an infant is born unexpectedly with a genetic disease like Down Syndrome. In such trunks, parents will often ask him what it all means.
They don’t want a detailed explanation of the chromosomal anomaly, but rather to make out how to deal with this new reality and how to be proper caregivers. Sometimes they just to talk to someone about their dialect expects and fears.
“At some point, the real bar should be whether or not you can actually listen to patients and talk to them,” Klasko said.
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