Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine to begin accepting applications in June
The Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine was set to accept applications from prospective students in June 2019, with the intention of opening the doors to its first class in the summer of 2020. It will waive all tuition for the full four years of school for its first five classes.
“Our students will learn to critically examine factors that influence their patients’ health in their homes, workplaces, schools, and communities – and become effective health advocates for their patients,” said Mark Schuster, M.D., PhD, founding dean and CEO of the school, to be located in Pasadena, Calif.
The school intends to provide students with clinical experiences in Kaiser Permanente’s integrated healthcare system, starting at the beginning of their first year. It will use a small-group, case-based medical curriculum designed to prepare future physicians to become collaborative, transformative leaders committed to prevention, fluent in data-driven care, and adept at addressing the needs of underserved patients and communities, according to Kaiser Permanente.
Kaiser Permanente says that the school’s senior leaders have built a curriculum that integrates the school’s three academic pillars: Foundational Science, Clinical Science, and Health Systems Science, a discipline that studies care delivery from structural, organizational and interpersonal perspectives, and includes topics such as population health, social inequality, and quality improvement. The core of the curriculum will consist of case-based learning, in which students in faculty-facilitated small groups combine knowledge from each of the three pillars and apply it to promoting health, understanding illness, and providing care.
Another feature of the school will be its Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) model of clinical education. First-year students will work with primary care preceptors all year, giving them the opportunity to form relationships with patients and clinical mentors over time. Second-year students will continue in their primary care LICs and will also participate in LICs in obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery. Third- and fourth-year clinical education will be dedicated to the students’ exploration of potential specialties and other areas of interest.