The American Medical Association Medical Education Innovation Challenge: Incorporating the Student Voice Into Medical...

Medical education needs to evolve to continue producing physicians who are able to meet the needs of diverse patient populations. Students can be a unique source of ideas about medical education transformation.

In the fall of 2015, the authors created the American Medical Association Medical Education Innovation Challenge, an incentive-based competition for teams of two to four students. The challenge called for teams to "turn medical education on its head" by proposing a change to some aspect of medical education that would better prepare students to meet the health care needs of the future.

Teams submitted 154 proposals. Themes from the winning teams and those that received an honorable mention included innovative uses of technology, creating physical spaces to pursue solutions to health care problems, wellness education, and longitudinal learning experiences around health equity and advocacy. The authors invited all teams to submit an abstract of their proposal to be published in an abstract book. The four winning teams and the 24 teams that received an honorable mention and submitted an abstract were surveyed to assess the impact of the challenge. Fifteen teams (54%) responded. Ten of those teams (67%) were implementing their idea or a related innovation to some degree.

The American Medical Association continues to run a wide variety of innovation challenges (e.g., Healthier Nation Innovation Challenge, Health Care Interoperability & Innovation Challenge) that draw in diverse stakeholders to solve problems in medical education and the health care system more broadly.