9 min
How Medical Meetings Can Help a Broken U.S. Health-Care System PCMA Convene Podcast
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- Management
“If our conferences become more problem-focused as opposed to more traditional discipline-focused, you’ll see these diverse groups coming together. Which I think is exciting and sort of mind-opening.” – Clay Johnston, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.
Listen:
http://convenesite.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Convene_Ep10_Dell-Medical-School.mp3Illustration by Selman Designs
Clay Johnston thinks the U.S. healthcare system is broken. Health costs in the U.S. are much higher than any other country, yet our outcomes are ranked 34th in the world, he told Convene podcast host Ashley Milne-Tyte. Johnston has some ideas for how to address that, beginning with the way in which phycisians are trained and receive continuing medical attention.
We looked at the future of medical meetings in our cover story this month, and in this conversation, Johnston and Milne-Tyte delve deep into how medical conferences traditionally have been structured, what's already changing, and why the industry still has a long way to go.
Read the full transcript below:
Ashley Milne-Tyte: Welcome to the Convene Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley Milne-Tyte. This time on the podcast we meet Clay Johnston, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. He says medical conferences are ripe for an overhaul, but change is happening slowly.
Clay Johnston: All you have to do is have some well-known speaker stand up there and you’ve just entertained a thousand people in the audience, right? And these interactive approaches are much more labor intensive.
AM-T: Clay Johnston has been dean of UT Austin’s medical school for three years. Naturally, he’s invested in medical education – specifically in making that education more hands-on, less lecture-based. But before we started talking about conferences, I asked him to talk about the healthcare system in general. It’s almost become a cliché, the assertion that the US healthcare system is broken. Clay says there’s plenty of evidence to support that.
CJ: I mean one example for the U.S. is our healthcare prices are substantially higher than any other country. So 30% higher than Switzerland yet our health outcomes are by the WHO ranked 34th – between Costa Rica and Cuba. We spend about 9,000 a year on healthcare, in Cuba they spend 800, and yet they live as long as we do.
AM-T: Another example, he says: doctors and patients generally can’t email each other, even though email might be an efficient way to get questions answered.
CJ: Another is that half of patients aren’t taking their medications as directed three months after the prescription is written, and we do nothing to monitor that, provide tools, track knowledge, help people with that problem.
AM-T: He says that is the number one reason drugs don’t work —people just aren’t taking them correctly. He believes conferences can play a role in better healthcare outcomes because they’re an important part of medical education. But for now, he says they have a ways to go. First, he started talking about how his school is training the physicians of the future. It’s quite a contrast to the way he was trained.
CJ: So there’s differences in content now than when I went to medical school. The facts-based memorization approach to teaching is much less relevant, it’s much more about problem solving and more about the systems of care and all that, and then the way in which we teach also needs to change. They can’t listen to lectures for 45 minutes and take notes and take tests, that just doesn’t work well.
AM-T: He says their curriculum is based instead on team-based problem solving. So medical students need to learn certain materials, there are some lectures, but they can be recorded and listened to at home. The classroom is used for thrashing through problems as a group, and working out solutions. He says even the classroom is set up so that peopl
“If our conferences become more problem-focused as opposed to more traditional discipline-focused, you’ll see these diverse groups coming together. Which I think is exciting and sort of mind-opening.” – Clay Johnston, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.
Listen:
http://convenesite.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Convene_Ep10_Dell-Medical-School.mp3Illustration by Selman Designs
Clay Johnston thinks the U.S. healthcare system is broken. Health costs in the U.S. are much higher than any other country, yet our outcomes are ranked 34th in the world, he told Convene podcast host Ashley Milne-Tyte. Johnston has some ideas for how to address that, beginning with the way in which phycisians are trained and receive continuing medical attention.
We looked at the future of medical meetings in our cover story this month, and in this conversation, Johnston and Milne-Tyte delve deep into how medical conferences traditionally have been structured, what's already changing, and why the industry still has a long way to go.
Read the full transcript below:
Ashley Milne-Tyte: Welcome to the Convene Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley Milne-Tyte. This time on the podcast we meet Clay Johnston, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. He says medical conferences are ripe for an overhaul, but change is happening slowly.
Clay Johnston: All you have to do is have some well-known speaker stand up there and you’ve just entertained a thousand people in the audience, right? And these interactive approaches are much more labor intensive.
AM-T: Clay Johnston has been dean of UT Austin’s medical school for three years. Naturally, he’s invested in medical education – specifically in making that education more hands-on, less lecture-based. But before we started talking about conferences, I asked him to talk about the healthcare system in general. It’s almost become a cliché, the assertion that the US healthcare system is broken. Clay says there’s plenty of evidence to support that.
CJ: I mean one example for the U.S. is our healthcare prices are substantially higher than any other country. So 30% higher than Switzerland yet our health outcomes are by the WHO ranked 34th – between Costa Rica and Cuba. We spend about 9,000 a year on healthcare, in Cuba they spend 800, and yet they live as long as we do.
AM-T: Another example, he says: doctors and patients generally can’t email each other, even though email might be an efficient way to get questions answered.
CJ: Another is that half of patients aren’t taking their medications as directed three months after the prescription is written, and we do nothing to monitor that, provide tools, track knowledge, help people with that problem.
AM-T: He says that is the number one reason drugs don’t work —people just aren’t taking them correctly. He believes conferences can play a role in better healthcare outcomes because they’re an important part of medical education. But for now, he says they have a ways to go. First, he started talking about how his school is training the physicians of the future. It’s quite a contrast to the way he was trained.
CJ: So there’s differences in content now than when I went to medical school. The facts-based memorization approach to teaching is much less relevant, it’s much more about problem solving and more about the systems of care and all that, and then the way in which we teach also needs to change. They can’t listen to lectures for 45 minutes and take notes and take tests, that just doesn’t work well.
AM-T: He says their curriculum is based instead on team-based problem solving. So medical students need to learn certain materials, there are some lectures, but they can be recorded and listened to at home. The classroom is used for thrashing through problems as a group, and working out solutions. He says even the classroom is set up so that peopl
9 min