Part 2
ASAHP: What do you believe is one of the critical needs in health professions?
JW: I believe there’s real value in having a large, robust database for information for the health professions in aggregate. We have a system that ties into our membership needs and I’d love to expand that for health professions as a whole. There are data out there by individual profession, but to have a consolidated database brings high value to the schools and their leaders. Deans can use that data to help leverage additional resources, recruit and retain faculty, and/or secure more grant funding based on what other schools are doing. This also aligns with our goal to increase ASAHP membership because as you increase sample size, you get better data which adds tremendous value for our member institutions.
ASAHP: What do you think are some of the greatest needs in Health Professions education?
JW: Health professions education is being challenged to meet the needs of a different generation of learners. This will likely involve an ongoing shift away from our traditional didactic lectures towards more engaging approaches such as on-demand digital resources, integration of more technology, including AI, as well as interactive and experiential learning using virtual reality, simulators, videos and gamification.
Having said that, we can't shortcut hands-on training and achieve quality training in health care. They've got patient care competencies and standards to meet to be a health care provider. Students also have to learn effective patient communication and demonstrate their knowledge through national board exams.
At the same time, we need to consider students' need for flexibility and support for mental health to improve engagement and retention. Our challenge is to accommodate, while maintaining our standards and not sacrificing quality. There's going to be some give and take.
ASAHP: You’ve shared that one of your goals for ASAHP is to increase membership. Can you share some thoughts on how you plan to do that?
JW: Our greatest marketing tool is our own members sharing their positive experiences with colleagues and validating the benefits of ASAHP membership and annual meeting attendance. I’d love to explore how we can better promote and facilitate such interactions. I look forward to doing more outreach to new Deans and to healthcare professionals in general to raise awareness of ASAHP. We should also look into more opportunities to collaborate with like-minded organizations and to seek out new industry partnerships. We want to be sure we are connected to potential employers of our graduates to help ensure the pipeline. Partnerships will allow us to ask hospitals and clinics how we can better prepare students to come to those facilities and how our students can add value. For example, ASAHP started with interprofessional education (IPE) and team-based care a pretty long time ago in health professions. What we realized early on was that while our students were getting training in IPE, they were often working in clinics that may not always have been engaged in team-based care. By collaborating more with clinics and hospitals, we can share strategies that providers can incorporate and allow the skills our students bring to add greater value to that system.
ASAHP: Can you speak in more detail about how you plan to help build leaders for the future within ASAHP and why that’s so critical?
JW: ASAHP has significant expertise in this arena given that we have a roster of deans who are excellent leaders. If someone is developing their skills to become a dean, ASAHP is the place to go as we have a strong network of academic leaders who can offer sound insight. ASAHP’s Leadership Development Program was designed to provide more formal academic leadership training and we also have an opportunity to expand this program and its reach. There remains a demand for leadership development in the health professions that supports the creation of an ASAHP Leadership Academy with more customized programming designed for all levels of academic leadership progression (e.g. faculty to chair, chair to dean, dean to provost). In the bigger healthcare picture, effective leaders build stronger academic programs that achieve high accreditation standards, more graduates with higher pass rates and higher job placement rates which translates into a more highly skilled workforce.
ASAHP: How do you think AI will affect health professions? What role do you think ASAHP will play in this change?
JW: AI is here. Its ongoing impact is significant, and its expansion is inevitable. We've got to be the ones that dictate how we use it, or how it's being used around us, to make sure it's net positive for health professions education. We can engage AI to power chatbots to answer student questions, create adaptive learning experiences, drive virtual reality (VR) and virtual patient simulations, create custom study materials, support predictive analytics to modify and improve curriculum, as a few examples. Perhaps ASAHP can develop a platform or repository to promote the online exchange of "AI-related best practices" as a member benefit. If necessary, we can bring in AI experts to help us harness the power of AI in order to use it in the most beneficial ways.