Knowledge Shot: Could you get an MD online

Today, you can get an online degree in a variety of fields in the healthcare system—everything from paramedic training, to medical billing, to dental hygiene, to phlebotomy.

Within the field of nursing, there are over 300 programs that offer bachelors, masters, and even doctorate degrees. Of course, if the training involves patient care these programs also require hands-on training in a clinical setting.

There is one healthcare degree that is not offered online, however, and that is the Doctor of Medicine or MD. For more than a century, MD training in the United States has included 2-years of preclinical training that’s largely done in the classroom, followed by 2-years of clinical apprenticeship.

The classroom-based teaching is usually done with passive lectures that are more often than not inefficient and unpopular.

In many schools fewer than one-third of the class even attend these lectures after the first semester. Further, a recent study has shown that in-class attendance doesn’t predict how well a medical student will perform academically.

So, if the majority of future physicians aren’t attending class, what are they doing? The answer is that these students are learning online.

Many students stream their professor’s lectures at 1.5x – 2x speeds while at home or at a coffee shop. They also invest in external resources such as osmosis.org to enhance their comprehension and retention of their class materials—not to mention increasing their test scores.

While there are examples of innovative models of medical education, there is no “online medical school” that enables completion of parts or all of the preclinical training virtually.

This is in part due to the stringent requirements by the Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME) which accredits medical education programs.

But there are a few trends that suggest there’s growing appetite for innovation in physician training. First, the vast majority of medical students are digital natives, meaning they have never known a world without the internet, and students are already spending a lot of their time learning online.

Second, as our population ages, there’s a growing need for more healthcare professionals—an estimated 35 million more are needed by 2030!

Nine of the top 15 fastest growing professions in the US in fact are in the healthcare industry, such as nurse practitioner and physician assistant.

As a result, finding efficient ways to train people is becoming increasingly important. Third, online education allows each person to learn at their own pace, so it facilitates competency-based learning, as opposed to time-based learning.

This decreases the amount of time it takes to complete a degree which reduces the cost of education, which in turn, decreases burnout and improves wellbeing.

Fourth, technology has increasingly become a decision support tool. In the future, less emphasis will be placed on the memorization of medical facts, and more will be placed on the ability to evaluate and weigh evidence.

Teaching medical students how to work with technology better prepares them for understanding how to navigate and apply the latest guidelines, rather than trying to simply commit a guideline to memory.

Fifth, because patients have access to the Internet as well, they’re becoming more empowered in their care journeys. Online medical information can help patients and their providers speak the same language and apply shared decision making.

As an aside, Osmosis.org is actively creating material for patient education. All of these trends are contributing to demand for efficient, convenient, and cost-effective medical education.

Like business and law school, medical school may consider moving much of the classroom-based coursework to an online format, which would enable students to progress at a self-directed pace through this curriculum before moving to the clinic to learn communication, procedures and teamwork in real life.

Thanks for watching. This video was adapted from the article “Could you get an MD online?” we recently published in Forbes.

A link to that article is in the description.