Cultural Change in a Medical School: A Data-Driven Management of Entropy

Medical students (MS), as a focus of investigation, are usually the last group that would be considered as suffering from mental health issues. However, the literature shows otherwise; MS suffer debilitating anxiety and depression which worsen with the progression of their studies. The literature also highlights the medical school curriculum as a significant cause of the elevated stress, anxiety, and depression levels within the MS population. This article explores the vulnerable nature of MS by focusing on the nature of the medical school’s hidden curriculum and culture, highlighting its impact on the entire medical education ecosystem and the MS. This article, then, investigates the three dominant epistemological belief frames in medical school which impact the vulnerable nature of MS. Finally, this article presents potential interventions, targeting the need for cultural change that may contribute to the creation of a more compassionate learning ecosystem to build the MS’ mental resilience in medical school and create a stronger medical workforce.

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Flipped healthcare for better or worse

Health Informatics Journal ◽

10.1177/1460458219833099 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 587-597 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Helena Vallo Hult ◽

Anders Hansson ◽

Lars Svensson ◽

Martin Gellerstedt

Keyword(s):

Professional Practice ◽

Cultural Change ◽

Medical Profession ◽

Rapid Development ◽

Data Driven ◽

Use Of Data ◽

Resident Physicians ◽

Clinical Scenarios ◽

Online Sources

The medical profession is highly specialized, demanding continuous learning, while also undergoing rapid development in the rise of data-driven healthcare. Based on clinical scenarios, this study explores how resident physicians view their roles and practices in relation to informed patients and patient-centric digital technologies. The paper illustrates how the new role of patients alters physicians’ work and use of data to learn and update their professional practice. It suggests new possibilities for developing collegial competence and using patient experiences more systematically. Drawing on the notion of flipped healthcare, we argue that there is a need for new professional competencies in everyday data work, along with a change in attitudes, newly defined roles, and better ways to identify and develop reliable online sources. Finally, the role of patients, not only as consumers but also producers of healthcare, is a rather formidable and complex cultural change to be addressed.

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Content analysis of 150 years of British periodicals

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1606380114 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 114 (4) ◽

pp. E457-E465 ◽

Cited By ~ 28

Author(s):

Thomas Lansdall-Welfare ◽

Saatviga Sudhahar ◽

James Thompson ◽

Justin Lewis ◽

Nello Cristianini ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Content Analysis ◽

Cultural Change ◽

Data Driven ◽

Steady Increase ◽

Named Entities ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Continuity And Change ◽

Use Of Data ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Regional Newspapers

Previous studies have shown that it is possible to detect macroscopic patterns of cultural change over periods of centuries by analyzing large textual time series, specifically digitized books. This method promises to empower scholars with a quantitative and data-driven tool to study culture and society, but its power has been limited by the use of data from books and simple analytics based essentially on word counts. This study addresses these problems by assembling a vast corpus of regional newspapers from the United Kingdom, incorporating very fine-grained geographical and temporal information that is not available for books. The corpus spans 150 years and is formed by millions of articles, representing 14% of all British regional outlets of the period. Simple content analysis of this corpus allowed us to detect specific events, like wars, epidemics, coronations, or conclaves, with high accuracy, whereas the use of more refined techniques from artificial intelligence enabled us to move beyond counting words by detecting references to named entities. These techniques allowed us to observe both a systematic underrepresentation and a steady increase of women in the news during the 20th century and the change of geographic focus for various concepts. We also estimate the dates when electricity overtook steam and trains overtook horses as a means of transportation, both around the year 1900, along with observing other cultural transitions. We believe that these data-driven approaches can complement the traditional method of close reading in detecting trends of continuity and change in historical corpora.

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Components of the Required Scholarly Project for U.S. Allopathic Medical Schools

10.21203/rs.3.rs-93933/v1 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Sarah Wypiszynski ◽

Erin Hartnett ◽

Pareena Kaur ◽

Matthew McEchron

Keyword(s):

Medical Student ◽

Medical School ◽

Research Question ◽

Journal Article ◽

Medical Schools ◽

Thinking Skills ◽

School Curriculum ◽

Independent Learning ◽

Data Driven ◽

Formal Curriculum

Abstract Background: The medical student scholarly project (SP) promotes self-directed independent learning and engenders critical thinking skills. The SP also allows medical students to understand scientific methods and promotes life-long learning practices. More medical schools have adopted aspects of the SP into their curricula, and notably the SP approaches have varied widely from one school to the next. Several studies have carefully documented the SP options for specific medical schools, but no study to date has compared the curricular components of the various medical schools with required SPs. Methods: This study queried 156 allopathic medical schools based in the U. S. to identify the curricular components of the various SPs. Each SP was analyzed to determine: (1) if it was required or optional, (2) its duration and placement within the four-year curriculum, (3) the capstone requirement (e.g., thesis, manuscript, and/or poster), (4) if the research required a data-driven research question and hypothesis, (5) if there was a formal curriculum dedicated to the SP, and (6) a list of the program objectives.Results: Our research shows that of the 156 medical schools examined, 108 schools (69%) have an SP included in their curricula, and 62 of the 156 (39.7%) require an SP for graduation. Only 24 (15.4%) of the 156 medical schools queried have a required SP that must have a data-driven research question. Of the 24, we found that six medical schools have a required SP spanning all four years of medical school, with a research question/hypothesis-driven project and completion of a final written thesis or journal article style manuscript. Conclusion: Numerous studies have described successful models of the medical student SP. We summarize the curricular components of the six medical schools that have a required, spanning all four years of medical school with a research question/hypothesis driven project and completion of a final written thesis or journal article style manuscript. We also describe two additional schools with comparable SP requirements, however, one of these example schools does not require a final written product and the other school concentrates the SP in a five-month period toward the end of the medical school curriculum.

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