As a young internal medicine attending physician, Colin Massey believes in the importance of a strong, comprehensive medical education. “With medical education, it’s no longer enough that doctors understand the basic principles of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. Now we need to be able to function in and improve complex medical systems that span the entire breadth of health care,” he says.

Massey comes from a legacy of Texas Exes, having completed his undergraduate studies at The University of Texas at Austin. With he and his sister both pursuing careers in health care, Massey and his family wanted to give back to their alma mater while advancing the future of health care in Austin. When they learned of the arrival of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, the Masseys felt a strong urge to get involved. Ultimately, they decided to establish an endowment to support medical education and the development of a completely redesigned curriculum at Dell Med.

“The face of healthcare delivery in this country is changing, and Dell Med is poised to help lead that charge. [The school] has a visionary mission to address the new challenges that come with those changes,” Massey says.

Dr. Sue Cox, Executive Vice Dean for Academics and Chair of Medical Education, is leading the charge to design a new curriculum for the incoming medical students at Dell Med, who start classes June 27. “As a brand-new medical school, we have the unique opportunity to create our own programs from the ground up. We can implement recent advances in teaching practices, such as team-based learning and technology integration, in addition to our own ideas, such as the signature third year,” Cox says.

The signature third year, an Innovation, Leadership and Discoveryblock, gives students the chance to direct their own study, perform research, or pursue a dual degree in fields such as public health, business and engineering. Additionally, Dell Med students will be trained from day one to use electronic health records, apply interdisciplinary approaches to case-based challenges, and solve problems through team-based learning. “Our goal is to train these students to become the next generation of visionary physician leaders,” Cox says.

The new curriculum will heavily focus on developing patient-centered healthcare delivery systems. One of the most unique features is Dell Med’s Developing Outstanding Clinical Skills (DOCS) program, which will train medical students to develop strong clinical skills over their four years of medical school.

In their first year of DOCS, students will develop foundational clinical skills and learn how to build strong patient-physician relationships. For their second and third years, students will follow the same patients through specific providers and clinical sites across the community, gaining greater insight into the prevention and management of diseases and chronic health issues over time from individual and community-based perspectives.

Massey sees immense value in addressing healthcare education and delivery from both a community-based and an individually based context. “We need innovative ideas to improve longitudinal community health. [We need to be] teaching students how to think about patients in context of their communities and in context of a complicated healthcare delivery system,” he says.

“The biggest challenge facing us now is that we’ve developed the capacity to treat acute illnesses, and as a result of that, now people are living so much longer with chronic illnesses. We as both a healthcare delivery system and a society have not figured out a way to responsibly take care of people on the long-term scale … we lack adequate infrastructure to manage complex diseases in the community.”

Massey believes part of the solution to this problem begins with a patient-centered approach to healthcare delivery. “At its heart, I do still believe that medicine should be about a doctor and their patients. It is still about the human side,” he says.

“First and foremost, Dell Med students need to be trained as excellent clinicians. I think the single most important quality is that they always be compassionate and comforting,” he says. “No matter what kind of [solutions] we develop to fix a broken system, if you’re a patient at 2 in the morning in the emergency room, you just want a doctor who’s going to comfort you and hopefully make you feel better. Can that doctor help cure their ailment, or at the very least be a comfort to them?”

Massey anticipates great success from Dell Med’s incoming class of medical students. He hopes Dell Med’s vision of rethinking medical education will create a rising generation of fellow physicians who are dedicated to bringing the highest quality of patient-centered care to each patient.

“I would like to see medical students become physicians who strive to give their best to every patient,” Massey says, “And when we find times that our best isn’t good enough that we find ways to make it better.”

Published June 2018