One More Thing…

Fascinating juxtapositions run throughout this issue of Healthcare Transformation, especially between the human spirit and the digital future.

About that digital future. Our Editor-in-Chief, Steve Klasko, likes to say we overestimate technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run.

In higher education, it's dangerous to underestimate the long-term changes of a digital economy. The question is how to anticipate it and ensure today's students are tomorrow's leaders.

The key: we have to prepare students for the shift from the era of hyper-specialized knowledge to the era of strategies for knowledge. For medical education, that's an intense culture change—today's body of knowledge is tomorrow's ancient history. Instead, the ability to design and apply learning becomes the way to keep up, to understand the flood of data, and to innovate.

I recommend this Brown Center Chalkboard blog at Brookings (see “Education and accelerated change: The imperative for design learning,” Daniel Araya and Heather McGowan, Brookings.edu, 9/14/2016, www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2016/09/14/education-and-accelerated-change-the-imperative-for-design-learning/).

“The truth is we can no longer afford to focus on graduating learners armed only with predetermined skills and (already existing) knowledge,” they write. “Students and learners need experience with exploration, discovery, reorientation, and most importantly, design thinking.”

This is why Thomas Jefferson University, our home institution, launched JeffDESIGN, the first “college within a college” to accept medical students into a design thinking curriculum (see “Making Design Thinking a Part of Medical Education,” Bon Ku, MD, MPP, Anuj Shah, and Paul Rosen, MD, MPH, MMM, 6/30/2016, http://catalyst.nejm.org/making-design-thinking-part-medical-education/).

The authors argue that design thinking has benefits for physicians as well as patients, “Engaging physicians in design thinking can unleash innovation. Working on design can help physicians combat the resignation and frustration of health care's challenges.”

This focus on design learning is also why Thomas Jefferson University (primarily graduate programs in health sciences) is merging with Philadelphia University (undergraduate and master's degrees ranging across professional fields, including one of the best fashion schools in the world).

The combination has already struck sparks, from design learning to cognitive and computational thinking.

Agreeing to combine: Steve Klasko, President of Thomas Jefferson University (left), and Steve Spinelli, President of Philadelphia University.

We'll hear more about this combined university in 2017. But its themes permeate the articles in this journal—strategies for learning, engagement of patients and learners, and the role of passion and advocacy in reshaping our communities of thought.

It's an exciting future. As Araya and McGowan write, “Rather than transferring a fixed body of knowledge and practices from experts to amateurs, design learning focuses instead on developing a learner's capacity to explore, make sense, and craft new innovation in search for new opportunities.”

And as Dr. Klasko says about physicians of the future, we need strategies to create meaning out of life paths.