Reflecting on medical education predictions for 2025

In the “About” section of my website, I mention that I had decided to go back to graduate school to study educational psychology. I decided to do this because the more I learned about medical education, the more I realized that I would be better equipped to assist health professions educators if I balanced my knowledge of test development with an increased understanding of how people learn. I did not mention that an editorial titled “Job Roles of the 2025 Medical Educator” (Simpson, Marcdante, et al 2018) provided me with the initial inspiration to study educational psychology. This editorial detailed six new roles that the authors believed medical educators would need to have by 2025 to reflect ongoing changes in medicine, education, and technology. Since it’s now 2025, I felt compelled to spend my next few blog posts reflecting on the job roles described in the editorial to see how true they feel today.

The six roles required of medical educators by 2025 (244) are as follows:

·      Diagnostic Assessor

·      Content Curator

·      Technology Adopter

·      Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach

·      Clinician Role Model

·      Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer

I’ll focus here on the Diagnostic Assessor and Content Curator roles.

“Diagnostic Assessor: Use results of big data to identify individual/group performance gaps to individualize training.

Content Curator: Access, select, sequence, and deliver high-quality content developed by national experts” (244).

The Diagnostic Assessor is meant to use data analysis to identify performance gaps at both the individual and group level, and to then take action based on those results. The Content Curator’s function is to identify and select appropriate content to utilize in education, focusing their efforts on choosing and prioritizing existing content rather than creating their own content from scratch.

These two role descriptions do seem to reflect two pieces of the expectations of health professions educators today—really, two pieces of what is expected of all educators today. I especially appreciate the focus on the Diagnostic Assessor using the results of data to individualize training, which is a shift that has happened in medical education over time. Normative and criterion-referenced data are still utilized in medical education, and they provide useful information, but increased priority is now being given to tailoring education to the individual based on the results of assessment data. This also connects to the Content Curator, who ideally will be considering assessment results when selecting additional content for their students. The Content Curator should be evaluating assessment results to see if those results indicate that their instructional materials should change and selecting new content accordingly.

As a person who is a patient, and who spent years working in medical assessment, I appreciate the shift in medical education to incorporate these two roles. I also know that there is already a great deal expected of medical school faculty, and that they will need support from their institutions in incorporating new skills and knowledge into their work. Future posts of this blog will consider these challenges more in depth and will share interventions that have been implemented by educators, and the benefits and challenges of these interventions. My goal in sharing such information is to provide ideas for practical ways to move forward in health professions education. I’m looking forward to digging more into these areas and hope you’ll continue to join me in this space.

Source: Simpson, D., Marcdante, K., Souza, K.H., Anderson, A., & Holmboe, E. (2018, June 1). Job Roles of the 2025 Medical Educator. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 10(3): 243–246. https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-18-00253.1