Five years ago, the leadership of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine embarked on a quest to broadly restructure the undergraduate training program to better equip medical students with the knowledge and skills necessary to excel in real world practice. With the backdrop of a rapidly changing healthcare industry, the education leaders rethought, reworked and retooled the program.

The resulting Curriculum 2.0 represents a move away from traditional medical school education to a more collaborative, integrated, flexible course of study with enhanced case study and hands-on clinical experience. Aided by a grant from the American Medical Association’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative, Vanderbilt’s Curriculum 2.0 made its debut with the entering class of 2013.

Bonnie Miller, MD, associate vice chancellor for Health Affairs and senior associate dean for Health Sciences Education, said at the foundation of the rebooted program is a commitment to creating master adaptive learners. “The most important thing we can do is teach our students to be expert, lifelong learners,” she said of the ability of these future providers to transform alongside the health delivery system.

Now approaching the halfway mark for the first class, Miller highlighted some of the changes implemented with the 2013 class.

“They had one preclinical year instead of the traditional two,” she said. “The clerkship year got moved to the second year from the third.” The first phase, Foundations of Medical Knowledge, integrates biomedical, behavioral, social and systems sciences, medical humanities, and physical diagnosis. The core clerkship phase, Foundations of Clinical Care, consists of six clerkships over a 41-week period and includes an emphasis on cost effective diagnostic approaches.

Miller continued, “What that does is give us more time in the third and fourth years to do a couple of things … the first is to allow (students) to delve more deeply into areas they are most interested in so they have two elective years instead of one.”

In addition, she said, “We already have started to implement a new content area, which is really taking a systems approach to care.”

Students look at healthcare from the macro level – with a focus on population health, healthcare economics, the Affordable Care Act and other policy impacting care delivery – down to the micro level of how to manage patients and populations within the practice setting with a lot of thought given to transitions of care.

Additionally, research projects have been given more emphasis. Where students previously embarked on an eight-week project, all are now required to complete at least a three-month research project, with some students undertaking a six-month project.

While advanced clinical competencies are still central to a Vanderbilt medical education, Miller said the focus has broadened to the delivery of collaborative, high quality, highly efficient care.

“Especially for our students, who we hope will be leaders, it’s very, very important for them to have an idea of how the system works,” Miller said.

Equally important is for the students to understand how they, themselves, learn and progress. Portfolio coaches keep up with scores, tests, clinical evaluation forms, and other measures to graphically show a student’s growth over time. Miller said these coaches help students individually identify strengths, weaknesses and the best ways to learn.

“We hope this is something they’ll carry with them … being reflective practitioners, self aware, and always striving for improvement,” Miller concluded.