Training tomorrow's doctor-engineers: The medical profession is changing, and so must medical education - [Spectral Lines]

When King Li went to medical school 40 years ago, he sometimes felt like he was trying to memorize the human body. "I'd see these curves in the textbook, and have to memorize: ‘If the patient's kidneys are failing, reduce this drug by 30 percent,’ " he remembers. "But I didn't understand why." ¶ In many medical schools, little has changed. But Li is heading up a brand new school with a radically different approach. When it comes time for the students to study pharmacology, he says, they'll have more than a chart in a textbook—they'll have a computer program with a simulated patient to learn on. "If the kidneys start failing, they can experiment with changing the dosage of the drug," he says. ¶ Li is dean and chief academic officer for Carle Illinois College of Medicine, created in partnership by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Carle Health System. Li says the school is the first in the world to apply engineering principles to the teaching of medicine, bringing analytics and problem-based learning to every aspect of the curriculum. The school just welcomed its first class of 32 students, who arrived with more than the typical premed coursework under their belts; students are also required to have high-level math, computer science, and statistics. ¶ While plenty of M.D.-Ph.D. programs already exist that enable students to get both medical and advanced engineering degrees, Li says Carle offers something very different than that "layered-on" method. Rather than going to medical school to learn about the human cardiovascular system and engineering school to learn about fluid dynamics, he says, Carle's students will learn about both at once. Every course will have three instructors, to cover the biological science, clinical applications, and engineering aspects of the topic.