“One of the most important updates we've made to the existing Patients and Populations course is a shift to a longitudinal research and health sciences curriculum connecting across all four years of medical school,” says Julie Taylor, MD, MSc, associate dean for medical education, and interim chair of the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Geisel School of Medicine.
The course’s new name, Population Health, reflects this deeper dive into public health issues and how they are discussed.
Launched ten years ago as Patients and Populations, the course was Geisel's initial step in designing a four-year healthcare delivery science curriculum. Students pursued hypothetical and real-world short-term healthcare research projects, presenting their projects in a Spring open forum. Now ten years later, the Associate Dean for Pre-clerkship Education, Virginia Lyons, PhD, felt that the format was ripe for redesign. “I am grateful that Dr. Taylor has intentionally utilized years of student feedback to inform her plans for revision.”
Taylor, fresh off her first year as a module leader and course leader, posed an important question to the redesign team working under the supervision of Geisel’s Medical Education Committee: How should this course prepare future physicians for changing expectations in healthcare? Taylor’s answer was to empower students with the knowledge, capabilities, and motivation to be effective, collaborative problem solvers and change agents; who go on to make a difference in the health of communities and populations; and who advance the effectiveness and value of healthcare.
These goals are deeply embedded in the new Population Health course, launched at the beginning of this academic year. The longitudinal course anchors a new four-year Research & Scholarship curricular thread—a research methodology-based curriculum that begins in the first year of medical school and culminates in a scholarly project presented in the fourth year.
Dartmouth has an abundance of researchers and practicing clinicians with expertise in population health and Taylor wanted them to lead and teach in the new curriculum. “One of the things Terri and I worked on with our new team of module leaders, Drs. Alix Ashare, JoAnna Leyenaar, Joel Bradley, and Matt Mackwood, was connecting these local superstars with our medical students,” she says.
Terri is Terri Eastman, MEd, CHES, director of Geisel’s integrated curriculum, and part of the course redesign team. She says that having clinically active physician-leaders and physician-scientists forming the leadership of the course is valuable to medical students. “They can talk about population health from the perspective of a clinician, providing a viewpoint of the environment our students will be working in.”
Raymond Huang, a first-year medical student, says that “One of my biggest takeaways from the Population Health course is realizing just how complex the American healthcare system is, especially compared to other models around the world. I think it’s valuable that we’re exposed to these ideas so early in our medical education and encouraged to think about healthcare delivery at a structural and population level. As a future physician, it’s important to understand how these systems shape the experiences and outcomes of the patients we care for.”
The current Population Health course is organized into five modules extending over the first two years of medical school that explore foundational research skills; structural forces affecting the U.S. healthcare system; tools and tenets of improvement science; team-based learning, collaboration, and networking with interprofessional students across New Hampshire; and applying emerging skills to complex topics and longitudinal projects.
First-year interprofessional education includes an expanded shadowing program with Geisel medical students shadowing nurses and allied health professionals at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. In their second year, medical students participate in a scenario-based program introducing them to healthcare providers they will encounter in clinical environments—collaborating with physician assistant students from Franklin Pierce University and nursing students from Colby Sawyer College.
Taylor says she likes this framing for population health, and is pleased with how the leadership team, clinicians, population health experts, and teachers have come together.
“This is a valuable course for our students,” Eastman says. “We are showing our medical students the path forward by introducing them to public health in a way they are not thinking about when they're deeply embedded in, say, renal physiology. This a very practical skills-based course. Not clinical skills, but all the other softer skills you need as a physician.”
Ultimately, Geisel trains medical students to think more broadly about healthcare, to be adaptive learners who can easily access and interpret continually evolving information. They learn how to use data to provide outstanding patient care within the context of a complex healthcare system and develop the skills to contribute to faculty-led research projects.