Penn Med resident champions healthcare curriculum

At the University of Michigan Medical School, Mitesh Patel spent two years learning how to diagnose heart failure. He knew the signs, symptoms and how to treat it.

But when he encountered his first patient in a hospital setting, he wasn’t sure how insurance worked, or even how healthcare policy connected with his work. Frustrated, he took a year off, went to the Wharton School, and graduated with a Masters of Business Administration in healthcare management.

Patel, now a second-year internal medical resident at Penn, has conducted research and co-written a paper calling for the implementation of a national healthcare curriculum.

“Medicine has come a long way — we’ve made a lot of steps in terms of curing different diseases, but we haven’t done as good of a job helping physicians, residents and medical students understand the context of what we’re practicing,” Patel said.

In order to focus on quality and cost-effectiveness while navigating a complicated healthcare system, physicians need to learn health policy in medical school, according to Monica Lypson, Patel’s co-author and Assistant Dean of Graduate Medical Education at the University of Michigan.

Because medical residents have gone to school at various universities, there is a disparity between the knowledge residents have of the healthcare system. By implementing a national curriculum, Patel hopes to level the playing field.

In a 2007 project, Patel studied the curriculum of various medical schools and noticed that students graduating from schools with a larger emphasis on teaching healthcare policy were four times more satisfied with their training and preparation for the real world.

When it comes to incorporating healthcare policy into its curriculum, Penn ranks within the top quartile and “has a very rich and robust program,” said Stanley Goldfarb, Associate Dean for Curriculum at Penn’s School of Medicine. “Penn Med School is all over [healthcare policy] like white on rice,” he said.

Goldfarb teaches a 20-hour course on healthcare systems where students are exposed to leaders from Wharton, healthcare systems and insurance companies in Philadelphia. To gain a comparative perspective, students prepare a capstone project on another country’s healthcare system at the end of the course.

Other areas of Penn’s curriculum cover additional topics such as health care disparity and drug development, which Patel said are important.

Despite Penn’s emphasis on teaching healthcare policy, Goldfarb does not think that other schools that lack this type of emphasis are failing to prepare their students. Because of the wide array of issues covered in medical schools, the curriculum is already packed and it is impossible to teach everything, he said.

He added that schools that choose to devote less time to healthcare policy still can be doing a reasonable job of preparing their students to be doctors. “It’s like saying ‘well, go become a physicist and whatever you learn by the end of graduate school, that’s all you ever need to know. But that’s not real and it’s the same with medicine,” Goldfarb said. “They’re not going to be doctors at the end of medical school, but they’re going to be prepared.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.