OHPE leadership embarks on co-creating system design for health professions graduate education

When Felix Ankel joined the Office of Health Professional Education as Vice President and Executive Director, he brought along a vision to co-create a systems approach to graduate health professions education. In this blog post, he shares insight on the project and expected outcomes:

How long have you been in your role as VP, Health Professional Education? What has changed in that time period?

I joined HealthPartners in 1994 as the assistant residency director for the Regions emergency medicine residency and started in my role as Vice President and Executive Director of Health Professional Education in 2013. During this time, I’ve seen several changes within the #meded community. I’ve noted that there are significant forces influencing these changes, such as:

1. Change of focus in GME from knowledge-based to a competency-based system.  The competencies now required of residency graduates transcend specialty-specific areas and include proficiency in improvement science, patient and family centered care, resource stewardship, and “teaming” behaviors
2. Residents are learning less from traditional sources such as textbooks, journal articles, and lectures and more from curated on-line sources in the “free open access medication” #FOAM movement and educational communities of practice
3. There has been a renewed focus on #meded and finance. Both in our government’s role in financing graduate medical education and the role of GME in educating residents in stewardship competencies such as decreasing total cost of care
4. There are increased national and state conversations looking at the health care workforce needed for the future and the role of physicians and advanced practice clinicians in shaping this workforce

What prompted the idea for the system design project?

When we started doing an inventory and due diligence of our current educational programs, we realized that we did not have a systems approach to graduate health professions education. The current graduate medical education system at HP is a disjointed blend of high-quality educational programs housed in individual operational units with little enterprise input from both care delivery and the health plan. The inventory and structure of this system is based on historical precedence, micro-financial considerations (cap count), operational unit dynamics, and relationships with the University of Minnesota Medical School.  Additionally, we have an opportunity to integrate advanced practice nurse and physician assistant learners into a graduate health professions education system

What did you consider when recruiting members from the organization to participate in the project?

One of our main goals for this project is to have our design be a co-created strategy with key stakeholders rather than an educationally run project.  Our working groups are led by non-educators that supported by institute leads. Group members include operational leads, educators, learners, and patients. Details about our approach and philosophy are located here.

What are the expected benefits/outcomes from this project? What are you excited about?

We hope to achieve the following with this design project:

1. Develop a co-created strategy for a health professions graduate education system that incorporates HealthPartners workforce modeling, identification of practice ready competencies, and a description of a sustainable financial model.
2. Educate our community on the design process. Archive of our work is located here.