A Medical Innovation and Entrepreneurship Curriculum at HMS

Abstract

Purpose: Medicine is a rapidly-evolving field with frequent shifts in scientific understanding, care delivery systems, and technological capabilities. It is our belief that medical students should be prepared not only to adapt to shifts in medical landscape, but also actively participate in scientific, technological and systems-level innovation. Thus, we set out to develop a sustainable medical innovation and entrepreneurship curriculum to prepare medical students to be active drivers in scientific, technological, and systems-level innovations in medicine. Methods: We originally proposed to develop a two-part curriculum, with one part occurring in the first year of medical school and the second part occurring post-PCE. We planned to measure our success through surveys in order to measure the medical students’ perceived value of the curriculum towards their education. Due to time constraints and various other logistical issues, we focused our efforts on the first part of this curriculum, refining it to a much shorter time period and adapting to meet unforeseen challenges. Our curriculum is outlined below. We have thus far only completed two sessions. We collected feedback from our first official session to measure perceived value. Results: Unfortunately we were unable to recruit enough participants to achieve statistically significant results in any of our metrics. For the following metrics, our results were as follows for our first session: “I enjoyed this session” had an average score of 7 out of 9 (standard deviation of 2.52), “Overall, I found this session valuable to me” had an average score of 7 out of 9 (standard deviation of 2.52), and “I would recommend integrating this session into the core curriculum at HMS” had an average score of 5.3 out of 9 (standard deviation of 3.2). Conclusions: Unfortunately, we are not able to make any firm conclusions regarding the curriculum given our small sample size of participants. However, feedback was largely quite positive and with a larger sample size, we may see statistically significant results. Interestingly, some students strongly recommended against integrating into the core curriculum. In conclusion, further studies are needed to validate the potential value of an entrepreneurial curriculum for medical students, but preliminary results are promising. Even so, integration into the core curriculum may not be the optimal approach, and the timing of the course may be of more critical importance than originally anticipated.