| AI is here
The question isn’t whether AI belongs in medical education. It’s already there, in the pocket of every resident on rounds, in the hands of the patients sitting across from us in exam rooms, embedded in the workflows of nearly every major health system in the country. The real question is whether we’re being honest with ourselves about what medical education was designed to produce, and whether our current system is still doing that job. The gap between clinical scenarios and real patients
Research has begun to illuminate this gap in uncomfortable detail. Early studies showing AI performing well on isolated clinical scenarios look quite different when a real human with all the messiness of actual communication is put back into the loop. Accuracy drops significantly. Context, it turns out, is everything, and context is something we learn through years of human interaction, not through optimizing for test performance. Medicine is a human endeavor at its core. What we’re training physicians to do and what we’re testing them on have drifted apart, and AI is exposing that drift in ways that are worth taking seriously. The future reimagined
A reimagined medical education system would select the qualities that make great physicians: empathy, curiosity, resilience, and the ability to function on a team; not just the ability to survive a gauntlet of standardized metrics. It would integrate AI as a teaching tool from day one, with faculty modeling how to use it responsibly rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. It would lean into microlearning, case-based reasoning, and the kind of contextual, human-centered problem-solving that no model has figured out yet how to replicate. The physicians who will thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones who memorized the most or scored the highest. They’re the ones who know how to learn continuously, use tools critically, and do something AI genuinely cannot: walk into a room, read a face, and make a person feel seen. — By MedCity Influencer Dr. Michael Jerkins |
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