How often in innovation are you encouraged to openly share concerns about your big idea?
By: Kimberly Lomis, MD
That’s exactly what our American Medical Association Precision Education Consortium has been up to: looking for trouble. As Interim Chief Academic Officer and Vice President for Medical Education Innovations at the AMA, I am fortunate to collaborate with inter-professional educators from across the country and the globe. When educators connect across institutions, we generate creative solutions to vexing problems.
In my blog last February, I announced the call for letters of intent for the American Medical Association’s $12 million grant initiative: Transforming Lifelong Learning through Precision Education. Precision education systems leverage data and technology, including artificial intelligence, to make individual learning more relevant and effective across the continuum of health professions training.1,2
Since then, my team at the AMA conducted a holistic review process to identify projects that would address three goals to advance competency-based education in the health professions (CBHPE): catalyze novel tech-facilitated assessments, address competency domains beyond medical knowledge, and generate meaningful personalization of training. To steer the work in the desired direction, we provided applicants with guidance around key considerations when creating such projects. We were graced with a multitude of ideas and have curated a portfolio of projects to explore these concepts across the continuum of medical education, in medical school, graduate medical education, and continuing professional development.
The 11 selected projects, funded at $1.1 million each over four years, involve over 80 institutions, including those with roles in oversight of medical education, such as the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), Intealth, and more. Grantees intend to leverage big data and artificial intelligence to assess and foster skills such as communication and clinical reasoning in authentic work settings (both as individuals and in teams). They plan to explore the unique competencies necessary to serve rural populations and advance preventative care. They will benchmark performance at the local, state, and national levels to guide individualized learning plans. They aspire to link these interventions to patient outcomes. We believe precision education will drive CBHPE super-charged by data, informatics and emerging technologies. Learn more about each of the funded projects here.
As excited as we are to support these big ideas, the AMA is intent on uncovering, and mitigating, potential risks of implementing precision education. Care must be taken to launch precision education in a truly developmental way, for we risk dooming the model from the start if capturing and utilizing multi-modal performance data is experienced by learners as a surveillance state. Only by testing these ideas in a variety of settings and in organizations with varying resources can we fully understand the challenges of implementing precision education and promote democratization of these tools. In the grant application process, we required prospective teams to divulge their concerns. My team applied artificial intelligence and human subject matter expertise to generate a thematic analysis based on input from our 30 finalists. We identified four domains of anticipated challenges when implementing precision education systems: data and technical issues; responsible design and deployment; engagement (of both learners and educators); and organizational culture.
Grantees are collaborating across projects to anticipate these pitfalls as they launch their projects; we want to tackle these issues before they send the construct astray. I am crafting this post fresh from our convening in Chicago on March 23 & 24. In addition to grantees, we gathered subject matter experts in equity, technology, CBHPE, and coaching. We benefitted from keynotes including Lara Varpio, PhD, discussing multiple dimensions of learner agency (a core principle of precision education), and Susannah Rose, PhD, advising on responsible development and processes to monitor artificial intelligence tools after deployment. A panel of “learners” (students, residents, and practicing physicians), designed their own plenary to envision the potential lived experience of trainees within precision education systems (which could veer dramatically from the faculty’s intent) and provided anticipatory guidance from their perspective.
Through several rounds of small group exercises, the consortium generated an inventory of risks across the four domains. By mapping stakeholders and envisioning workflows, we flagged plenty of concerns. On day two, the group shifted to identifying clear mitigating action steps. Based on these discussions, frameworks from prior AMA initiatives will prove essential: the Master Adaptive Learner; coaching; health systems science; and organizational considerations in CBHPE all arose as important elements. Consortium members will codify the conference outputs and generate a manuscript to share with the broader health professions education community. Our AMA team deliberately framed this conversation early in the grants process, hoping to steer precision education in a favorable direction. Our AMA embraces the fact that failure is a critical element of innovation. As educational programs experiment with AI and big data, we must create an environment in which exposing difficulties does not carry reputational risk. I am heartened by this group’s forthright and thoughtful approach. The consortium will share its successes and struggles with the broader educational community throughout the four-year grant period. We hope that all who are striking forth into this exciting new territory will join us in a culture of transparency and collaboration. Send an email to changemededmonthly@ama-assn.org to subscribe and follow the progress of the AMA Precision Education Consortium.
Refrences:
Desai SV, Burk-Rafel J, Lomis KD, Caverzagie K, Richardson J, O’Brien CL, Andrews J, Heckman K, Henderson D, Prober CG, Pugh CM, Stern SD, Triola MM, Santen SA.
Precision Education: The Future of Lifelong Learning in Medicine.
Acad Med. 2024 Apr 1;99(4S Suppl 1):S14-S20. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000005601
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38277444/
Desai SV, Khan S, Lomis KD
AI-Enabled Precision-Education Systems — Transforming Lifelong Learning in Medicine
N Engl J Med 2026;394:838-841Vol. 394 No. 9. Published February 21, 2026
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2512935
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2512935
About the Author:
Kimberly Lomis, MD is Interim Chief Academic Officer and Vice President for Medical Education Innovations at the American Medical Association, leading the AMA ChangeMedEd initiative as well as activities around artificial intelligence in medical education. Previously, Dr. Lomis served as professor of surgery and associate dean at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
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