Lessons learned teaching entrepreneurship to 1st year med students

Here are the modules for a 1st year medical student elective course at the University of Colorado School of Medicine

We are offering a modification of the course to 1st year medical students at newly created Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Wichita, KS.

This course introduces 1st year medical students to the principles and practice of the business of medicine and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship. Taught by a national panel of domain experts in a hybrid format, attendees will learn about the different challenges confronting entrepreneurs attempting to create user and other stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation using a viable, automatic, sustainable and time sensitive (VAST) business model.

We envision this course as an initial step in supplementing traditional medical education with offerings in:

Design Innovation & Healthcare Entrepreneurship

Virtual Health & Monitoring Devices

Emerging Technologies & New Sciences

Health Informatics & Data Science

Artificial Intelligence & Human Cognition

System Science & Health Systems

Medical Business & Healthcare Economics

Transdisciplinary Collaboration & Diversity Principles?

Professional Leadership & Virtual Presence

Social Determinants & Healthcare Ethics

Entrepreneurship is being offered as part of curriculum reform at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and is another part of our bioentrepreneurship education and training portfolio.

Each session is offered for one hour on Tuesdays between noon-1PM.

Introduction to Bioentrepreneurship

Intellectual Property

Regulatory Affairs

Revenue Models/Reimbursement

Digital Health

CU Innovation Ecosystem

Leading High Performance Teams/ Ethics

Value Proposition Design/Design Thinking

Creating a Business Model Canvas

Testing Business Ideas

Intrapreneurship

Non-Clinical Careers

Next Steps

If you are interested in offering such a course in healthcare entrepreneurship, here is a free open education resource that might help inform your thinking.

So, what have I learned teaching this subject to first year medical students now that the course is over?

1. 1st year medical students, as expected, are overwhelmed with what they are having to learn, particularly in a reformed curriculum, in their first year basic science and systems courses. The incoming class has 186 students. 15 signed up to take the elective in the first trimester.
2. 3 students withdrew from the class citing concerns about not being able to drink any more than they have to from the fire hose or the subject matter was not a good fit for them.
3. A student representative volunteered to serve as an interface between me and the class and has provided extremely valuable formative feedback from the students as well as communications to the students.
4. The course coordinator, who has a Masters degree in educational technologies, has also been extremely valuable helping to remind students of pre-session assignments as part of our flipped classroom model and helping to construct the material and curriculum design and delivery on the learning management system. Practice reverse mentoring.
5. Understandably, but unfortunately, students are focused on learning to the test and not being distracted by the rest. The course in pass-fail. The grading rubic is designed to be lenient, given their other learning demands.
6. We follow a 20-20-20 rule. The guest instructor presents for twenty minutes, with or without a Powerpoint presentation limited to 10 slides. 20 minutes is reserved for an instructor moderated "fireside chat" and 20 minutes allotted for students questions, or more, since they have priority on the class time. Prior to a recent class, I was told that during the class preceding this one, students where presented with 60 slides about a GI systems subject in 30 minutes because of technical issues during the lecture. They need to take a breath.
7. It is assumed that, despite the fact that a few of the students have pre-medical school backgrounds in business or computer science, that, when it come to sickcare innovation and entrepreneurship, they don't know what they don't know. As such, the learning objectives are at a higher introductory level to not just create awareness and inform, but more importantly, to inspire them.
8. Engaging students is always a challenge . Here is the boomer's guide to teaching millennials. I used several techniques to keep students engaged including case- based learning, real world examples, including subject matter experts, reflective learning questions posed before each class, media exemplifying contemporary issues and relevance of the subject matter, and office hours.
9. Medical school faculty, including myself, will need much more teaching development and training as the curriculum expands.
10. There are four things students have told us they like the most: 1) There are no tests and they can just learn for the fun of it, 2) they like to hear about the diversity of the guest faculty entrepreneurial journeys, 3) they like learning about physician career strategies and non-clinical career opportunities, and 4) they want to see real world examples of success and failures 5) they want to understand why the subject material is important and relevant to them at their stage of education.
11. There are no textbooks for the course, We either use or develop open educational resources. We use Linkedin Learning since all students, faculty and staff at the university get access to the courses for free.
12. Pre session assignments are limited to under one hour to review outside of class. The time to review is indicated on the session sites.
13. Expect neither support from other faculty that have their own claims on student time nor alignment of expectations and accountability from leaders.
14. We plan to offer follow up more in depth courses and experiences in the later years of medical school after students have had more clinical exposure and better understand the "why" of the introductory sessions.
15. Find an organizational leader who can serve as a "nurse with a purse" i.e someone who walks the talk about innovation, will actively sponsor and help support your success and has a budget.

Here are some tips on managing team project based learning.

In my experience, the most effective ways to engage students are:

1. Preach what you practice. Students want real world stories from practitioners, not theorists
2. Show then you care. Engage with them before and after sessions and be available
3. Demonstrate how to deal with failure
4. A boomer's guide to teaching Millennials and Gen Z students

These researchers found that offering entrepreneurship education increases awareness and motivates students to learn more. However, practical applications, use cases, and hands-on projects, as well as faculty who have entrepreneurial experience are strong drivers.

Results outline several success factors to improve the implementation of entrepreneurship education within medical universities: (1) incorporate innovation, entrepreneurship, and practice; (2) create strong links to industry and healthcare organizations; (3) provide support and resources for entrepreneurship education; (4) encourage a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship; (5) develop policies that support innovation and entrepreneurship based on medical/healthcare perspectives.

Another group suggested these things when teaching AI to medicals students. They also apply to teaching entrepreneurship:

• Identify Core AI Competencies: Defining a list of competencies provides a standardized structure that can be integrated into existing competency-based medical curricula. The workshop currently uses learning objectives levels 2 (understand), 3 (apply), and 4 (analyze) of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Having resources for higher taxonomic levels, such as creation of a project, can further consolidate knowledge. This requires collaboration with clinical experts to identify how AI topics can be applied to the clinical workflow and to prevent teaching redundant topics already included in standard medical curricula.
• Create AI Case Studies: Similar to clinical vignettes, case-based instruction may consolidate abstract concepts by identifying relevance to clinical problems. For example, a study in the workshop analyzed Google’s AI-based diabetic retinopathy detection system to identify bench-to-bedside challenges such as external validation requirements and regulatory approval pathways.
• Use experiential Learning: Technical skills require deliberate practice and repeated application to master, similar to the learning clinical trainees experience while on rotations. One potential solution is the flipped classroom model, which reported increased knowledge retention in engineering education. In this model, students review theoretical material on their own and class time is used for problem-solving using case studies.
• Expand to Multi-Disciplinary Participants: We envision the implementation of AI involving interaction from various disciplines, including physicians at different levels of training and allied health professionals. As such, curriculum-development in consultation with educators from different faculties may be needed to tailor content for different healthcare domains.

At this stage, like any edupreneurship startup, we are running experiments to test our business ideas. So far, we have made several mid-course pivots to accommodate student needs and wants while recognizing the reality that they will have to pass certain tests to graduate and practice medicine. We are all learning how to become a more entrepreneurial, ambidextrous entrepreneurial medical school.

Here are some tips on how to test your business ideas.

Future directions might include:

1. Expanding the offerings to medical students beyond the first year
2. Using more advanced pedagogical techniques to advance students higher in the heirarchy of learning

3. Incorporating project and case-based learning collaborations with industry as well as simulations

4. Additional integration into the univeristy and regional innovation ecosystems

5. Building certificate and Masters level offerings

6. Validating a sustainable business and revenue model

Stay tuned for our Series A offering.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship