National Value-Based Healthcare Competition for Medical Students

Abstract

Background Although we have amazing tools like immunotherapy and radiation therapy to offer our patients, all too often the process of delivering this world-class care simultaneously burdens our patients. Medical school curriculums are only beginning to appreciate the importance of including value-based care education in their curriculums. As future physicians, it is our responsibility to contribute to solving these deficiencies in our process, but to do so we need to build educational tools that expose us to these concepts, is engaging enough to justify devoting ever limited time in medical school, and empowers us to be able to act. Methods Our team designed and implemented a National Value-based Care competition, that provides a longitudinal curriculum for students to voluntarily learn about value-based care through three components: 1) Local School Competition, 2) National Competition, 3) Peer mentorship/leadership. In the first phase, the local school competition, teams of 4-5 medical students review a standardized patient case (based on a real patient), identify value deficits in the process, explore one specific value deficit in detail and propose a solution. In the National Competition, the winners from each school, compete to implement their solution and collaborate with key stakeholders at their hospital through the Six Sigma process improvement methodology. Finally, the winners from each school become the mentors and local competition organizers for the next year. Results In our first year, we focused on our own medical school (MCG), and had 6 teams of students representing 28 students from the M1 and M2 classes submit their final project. We received positive feedback from the students, their faculty mentors, as well as the faculty judges. We then exported, including 4 schools: MCG, Florida State University (FSU), Baylor, and Penn State. Across the four schools we had 30 teams participate representing 134 medical students. The top three winning teams all produced real world projects that were either IRB approved or seeking IRB approval. Discussion We created a case competition that increased engagement with key value-based healthcare concepts for students. It is worth noting, that participation was entirely voluntary, so our results suggest students across multiple school are interested in these topics and even willing to see a project all the way through when provided an engaging and incentivizing process. We are now training the next generation of student competition organizer to prepare for the next set of local and national competitions. Although we have amazing tools like immunotherapy and radiation therapy to offer our patients, all too often the process of delivering this world-class care simultaneously burdens our patients. Medical school curriculums are only beginning to appreciate the importance of including value-based care education in their curriculums. As future physicians, it is our responsibility to contribute to solving these deficiencies in our process, but to do so we need to build educational tools that expose us to these concepts, is engaging enough to justify devoting ever limited time in medical school, and empowers us to be able to act. Our team designed and implemented a National Value-based Care competition, that provides a longitudinal curriculum for students to voluntarily learn about value-based care through three components: 1) Local School Competition, 2) National Competition, 3) Peer mentorship/leadership. In the first phase, the local school competition, teams of 4-5 medical students review a standardized patient case (based on a real patient), identify value deficits in the process, explore one specific value deficit in detail and propose a solution. In the National Competition, the winners from each school, compete to implement their solution and collaborate with key stakeholders at their hospital through the Six Sigma process improvement methodology. Finally, the winners from each school become the mentors and local competition organizers for the next year. In our first year, we focused on our own medical school (MCG), and had 6 teams of students representing 28 students from the M1 and M2 classes submit their final project. We received positive feedback from the students, their faculty mentors, as well as the faculty judges. We then exported, including 4 schools: MCG, Florida State University (FSU), Baylor, and Penn State. Across the four schools we had 30 teams participate representing 134 medical students. The top three winning teams all produced real world projects that were either IRB approved or seeking IRB approval. We created a case competition that increased engagement with key value-based healthcare concepts for students. It is worth noting, that participation was entirely voluntary, so our results suggest students across multiple school are interested in these topics and even willing to see a project all the way through when provided an engaging and incentivizing process. We are now training the next generation of student competition organizer to prepare for the next set of local and national competitions.