Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Dec;27(1):2096841.
doi: 10.1080/10872981.2022.2096841.

The pipeline starts in medical school: characterizing clinician-educator training programs for U.S. medical students

Ryan C Bahar  1 , Aidan W O'Shea  2 , Eric S Li  1 , Madisen A Swallow  1 , August A Allocco  1 , Judy M Spak  3 , Janet P Hafler  4
Affiliations

The pipeline starts in medical school: characterizing clinician-educator training programs for U.S. medical students

Ryan C Bahar et al. Med Educ Online. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

In the past forty years, clinician-educators have become indispensable to academic medicine. Numerous clinician-educator-training programs exist within graduate medical education (GME) as clinician-educator tracks (CETs). However, there is a call for the clinician-educator pipeline to begin earlier. This work aims to identify and characterize clinician-educator track-like programs (CETLs) available in undergraduate medical education (UME). We developed an algorithm of 20 individual keyword queries to search the website of each U.S. allopathic medical school for CETLs. We performed the web search between March to April 2021 and repeated the search between July and September 2021. The search identified CETLs for 79 (51%) of the 155 U.S. allopathic medical schools. The identified CETLs commonly address the clinician-educator competency of educational theory (86%, 68/79), are formally organized as concentrations or analogous structures (52%, 41/79), and span all four years of medical school (37%, 29/79). The prevalence of CETLs varies with geography and medical school ranking. We provide an overview of the current state of CETLs as assessed from institutional websites. To create a future with a sustainable output of skilled clinician-educators, UME must continue to increase the number and quality of CETLs.

Keywords: Clinician-educator; career development; medical student; scholarly concentration; undergraduate medical education.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
(a) Web search algorithm. (b) Cumulative percentage of clinician-educator track-like (CETL) programs identified after each search term.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Clinician-educator track-like (CETL) program availability at U.S. allopathic medical schools.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
(a) Percent of clinician-educator track-like (CETL) programs (n = 79) that fulfill each of the CETL criteria. (b) CETL program classification (n = 79). ‘Concentrations’ encompasses formal certificates, concentrations, distinctions, pathways, projects, and tracks.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Clinician-educator track-like (CETL) program timing chart (n = 75). Line thickness represents the number of schools. Four schools are excluded from the visualization as their programs may occur at an unspecified or variable time during M1 – M4 (3) or unspecified time during ‘upper years’ (1).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Greenberg L. The evolution of the clinician-educator in the USA and Canada: personal reflections over the last 45 years. Acad Med. 2018;93(12):1764–21. - PubMed
    1. Levinson W, Rubenstein A. Mission critical–integrating clinician-educators into academic medical centers. N Engl J Med. 1999;341(11):840–843. - PubMed
    1. Levinson W, Branch WT Jr, Kroenke K. Clinician-educators in academic medical centers: a two-part challenge. Ann Intern Med. 1998;129(1):59–64. - PubMed
    1. Levinson W, Rubenstein A. Integrating clinician-educators into academic medical centers: challenges and potential solutions. Acad Med. 2000;75(9):906–912. - PubMed
    1. Fleming VM, Schindler N, Martin GJ, et al. Separate and equitable promotion tracks for clinician-educators. JAMA. 2005;294(9):1101–1104. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources