The future of medicine is arriving faster than our training models are evolving.
A student starting medical school in 2026 won’t earn their M.D. until 2030, and likely won’t finish residency or practice independently until 2033 or beyond. By then, the clinical and technological landscape will look dramatically different from the one many current curricula were designed for.
We are only a few years into the
#GenAI era, and already medicine is being reshaped by multimodal data, AI-assisted decision support, remote patient monitoring, digital health, and new models of continuous, personalized care—not to mention agentic health and the growing direct-to-consumer shift in health(care).
So we need to ask some uncomfortable but necessary questions:
How should we be selecting future physicians?
What should they actually be trained to do?
And how should we evaluate readiness in a world where information is abundant, AI is increasingly capable, and human judgment matters more than ever?
I recently had the opportunity to keynote the leadership of the NBME, the organization behind the
#USMLE exams that serve as a powerful “north star” for much of medical education. To their credit, NBME is proactively exploring the future of assessment and training. My message was simple: if the landscape of care is changing—with many clinicians already using AI to augment diagnostic and therapeutic decisions—the metrics we use to train and assess physicians, and clinicians more broadly, must evolve as well.
It’s time for a kind of Flexner Report 2.0.
That means moving beyond legacy training and assessment models toward medical education built for modern practice:
• Real-world assessment that reflects the complexity and ambiguity of actual care
• AI-enabled OSCEs and immersive simulations using virtual and augmented reality
• Fluency in AI, digital health, multimodal and real-world data, nutrition, prevention, and design thinking
• Training physicians not just to recall facts, but to synthesize information, ask better questions, use tools wisely, and deliver human care
• Preparing clinicians not only to manage disease, but increasingly to optimize healthspan across the lifespan
The key question is no longer just what we should add to the curriculum.
It’s also what we should stop teaching, streamline, or offload to technology to make room for what matters most.
Technology should not just be another subject in medical school. Increasingly, it will become part of the platform through which medicine is learned, practiced, and improved.
The future of healthcare will not belong to those who simply know the most facts. It will belong to those who can integrate data, leverage intelligent tools, adapt continuously, and still show up with empathy, wisdom, and human connection.
The transition is already underway. Are we ready to redesign medical education for the world ahead?
#MedEd