Transforming Educational Design: The Experience and Stories of Harvard Medical School’s Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship

The Collaboration for InterProfessional Health Education Research & Scholarship (CIPHERS) invites you to their Interprofessional Visiting Professor Talk: “Transforming Educational Design: The Experience and Stories of Harvard Medical School’s Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship.”

Thursday, May 18
Noon – 1:30 pm
Available via Zoom

Speaker

David Hirsh, MD, FACP
Director, Harvard Medical School (HMS) Academy Medical Education Fellowship
Co-founder and Director, HMS’ Cambridge Integrated Clerkship

Dr. Hirsh graduated summa cum laude in History from Dartmouth College, earned his MD from the University of Virginia, and completed residency at the University of Michigan. Hirsh directs the Harvard Medical School Academy Medical Education Fellowship and is co-founder and Director of the Harvard’s Cambridge Integrated Clerkship–the first academic longitudinal integrated clerkship or “LIC.” (This program helped launch a transformative restructuring of clinical education and is replicated across the US, Canada, Australia, and in other nations). In 2021 was appointed a Harvard Medical School Associate Dean of Undergraduate Medical Education.

Hirsh has received local, national, and international honors for his teaching, academic work, clinical practice, and public service. His scholarship and academic contributions span academic domains, including “educational continuity,” medical education transformation, medical school program design, longitudinal integrated clerkships, OSCEs, clinical skills training and assessment, East Asian constructs of professionalism, humanism in medicine, and the theories and sciences of learning.
Clinically, Hirsh was the longest serving Medical Director of the City of Cambridge Healthcare for the Homeless Program, and he co-founded a community health center. He continues to practice in the Department of Medicine at the Women’s Health Center at Cambridge Health Alliance, to mentor student and faculty research, and to teach students in all years of the HMS curriculum.

Summary
The longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) model is grounded in principles derived from the sciences of learning–social and cognitive psychology, general education, and medical education. The structure has proved transferable across institutions and contexts and is informing clinical education transformation nationwide and worldwide. This session reviews the case for change and rationale that drove the wholesale redesign of the clinical year from traditional blocks to LICs. Participants will learn how the LIC structure grew directly from the case for change and from educational science. We will review one LIC, Harvard Medical School’s Cambridge Integrated Clerkship and consider its students’ learning and professional outcomes. We will consider the imperatives for change and the success of LIC models: why and how are LICs driving innovations across the continuum of medical education and advancing the discourse in health professions education more generally.

Learning Objectives

• Upon completion of this session, participants will be able to
  List, explain, and interpret the “case for change” driving medical education reform;
• Recognize and select principles derived from the sciences of learning that address the case for change;
• Generalize applications of the learning sciences to create longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs);
• Investigate and interpret the data about one such LIC—Harvard’s Cambridge Integrated Clerkship;
• Extrapolate features of longitudinal integrated design that serve your context.