School of Medicine faculty peeked into the future last week with the help of professional visionaries. A panel of 10,including Internet communication pioneer Howard Rheingold and futurist Paul Saffo, discussed what students and medical schools might be like in the year 2015. The roughly 60 attendees (mostly faculty) then broke into small groups to dream up the educational programs of a dozen years out.

Parvati Dev, PhD, the school’s associate dean for learning technologies; Charles Taylor, PhD, assistant professor of surgery and of mechanical engineering; and Maggie Saunders, the school’s education program and project planner, organized the Thursday symposium, to encourage creative educational programming that will be in sync with technological innovations.

Futurist Paul Saffo (front row, third from left) took part in a panel discussion on the role of technology and the future of medical education. A similar meeting to further explore such concepts is already being planned. Photo: Rosanne Spector

Among the predictions about education in 2015 to emerge during the brainstorming session:

• Skills used to control how machines access other machines will be more valuable than skills used to access information. ("Those with mastery will be people who can be circus masters of menageries of devices," said Saffo.)

• For medical students, the computer will be seen not as a barrier between people (as it seems now to many faculty) but as their primary mode of communication.

• A university located in one geographic location will be seen as "quaint."

• Medical subject matter will mutate so fast that a planned four-year curriculum may change in fewer than four years.

• Training students to be lifelong learners will be more important than teaching a specific body of knowledge.

In the break-out sessions, faculty directed the discussion into more specialized avenues, exploring the implications of technology in cardiac care and team-based medicine, cardiovascular physiology, cardiac anatomy and molecular fundamentals of heart function.

Out of the groups came dozens of ideas that could help shape the medical school’s curriculum and its educational infrastructure, including the planned "knowledge center" known as SMILE, said Dev, who participated in the anatomy group.

For instance, her group came up with a few ideas that could revolutionize anatomy dissection labs. "The group suggested that, since dissection is destructive to the cadaver and one cannot go backwards, each student’s cadaver could be scanned first," said Dev. "That way, the students could dissect and then use the scans to look at the whole cadaver again. They could study the context of the structures once they have made the actual structure visible."

Dev’s group discussed giving each dissecting team a handheld ultrasound scanner. "Students could scan themselves or each other to examine living tissue while they were doing the dissection on the cadaver," she said.

Other groups were productive as well. "We had an excellent discussion focused on the challenges of teaching more material in less time with the aid of new instructional methods and technologies," said Taylor, a participant in the cardiovascular physiology group.

The next step for Dev and Saunders will be to meet with the leaders of each group to develop plans to implement their teaching ideas. "Our goal will be to meet to develop proposals for incremental innovation in each of the areas," said Saunders. She and Dev will present the plans to the dean’s office for funding.

"There are no set-aside funds for this — but without a concrete plan one cannot even begin making changes," Dev said.

Dev and Saunders plan to hold another symposium within the year. Interested faculty may contact them to get involved.