Managing medical education at the University of Pennsylvania

In meeting the challenge of educating students to be physicians in the 21st century, schools of medicine must develop management systems that promote change and encourage innovation. In this paper, the authors describe the approach used by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine over the past five years for managing its programs. The major elements of this management scheme are centralization of administrative functions concerned with medical education; networks for communication about education problems and issues; a system for obtaining consensus among the institution's constituencies on the goals of the school's educational programs; a system for including information on teaching performance as an element in the promotion process; and multiple systems for providing the faculty, students, and administration with information about the quality of the school's educational activities.