Osteopathic panel suggests combination of med school, residency training

The nation is facing a shortage of primary-care physicians and medical students, who, now facing an average education debt of almost $167,000 at graduation, are seeking more lucrative specialties so they can get their heads more quickly above water.

The Blue Ribbon Commission for the Advancement of Osteopathic Medical Education is suggesting that one way to help solve this problem is to revamp medical education in a way that merges med school and residency training. This “new pathway” is described in a report in the Health Affairs journal. And co-author and panel co-chair Dr. Marc Hahn said that by basing training on competencies acquired rather than the passage of time, a primary-care osteopathic physician's education and training could be reduced from seven years to five.

“The Pathway would produce ready-for-practice osteopathic primary-care physicians who were well prepared to serve as leaders of interprofessional healthcare teams,” Hahn and his co-authors wrote. “A person would progress through medical school and residency training as he or she achieves established benchmarks of accomplishment—not when a certain date has arrived.”

Hahn, president and CEO of the Kansas City (Mo.) University of Medicine and Biosciences, said at a news conference that the new pathway would be a break from how physicians have been educated and trained for the past 100 years and would need modifications to state licensing and specialty board requirements to go forward.

Commission member Dr. Kenneth Johnson, executive dean of Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine's Northeast Ohio, Athens, said an attraction of this system is that graduates would train where they attended school and that students would know where they're going to train when they walk in the door.

The new system would also expose first-year medical students to clinical experiences with increasing levels of responsibility. Johnson said. He added that Heritage is putting many of the principles developed by the commission into practice at the institution's new $49 million extension campus located at the Cleveland Clinic's South Pointe Hospital in Warrensville Heights, Ohio.

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