JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digitalization is transforming the way we provide and experience medicine and healthcare. Experts have suggested various topics for medical curricula to keep pace with rapidly evolving knowledge; however, adapting these curricula remains a lengthy process that often lacks an interdisciplinary approach.

Objective:

This study examines the perspective of curriculum governing bodies and the boards responsible for curriculum operations at two medical universities towards the need for necessary curriculum changes to account for digitalization in medicine and the difficulties in adapting the curriculum to ever-growing knowledge. We identify and suggest ways for a more agile curriculum development.

Methods:

This study consists of an qualitative analysis of governing policy frameworks and a qualitative study involving 14 video interviews. The interviews were performed with members of university curriculum governing bodies and the boards responsible for curriculum operations.

Results:

Participants agreed that digitalization will reshape the medical profession by reducing physical contact, enhancing data-driven communication, and streamlining administrative processes. They highlighted the need for graduates to acquire digital literacy, critical evaluation skills, and a basic understanding of data and statistics. Yet, despite being designed as integrated program, participants noted curricula have become fragmented over time due to missing coordination between curriculum modules. Furthermore, current processes lead to a siloed perspective, where limited coordination between modules makes it difficult to implement new knowledge holistically. This lack of inter-module alignment emerged as a key barrier to coherent curricular change. Learning objectives were identified as a promising but underutilized tool for monitoring content, aligning modules, and ensuring that emerging topics like digitalization are integrated consistently.

Conclusions:

Participants agreed that current processes for monitoring and updating curricula are not efficiently designed and tend to be too static and focus on the advancement of subject-specific medical knowledge. To prepare current and future students for a rapidly changing world, curriculum processes should evolve from static, fragmented structures to more agile, integrated systems. By mapping the survey results to the curriculum development frameworks of Kern and Harden, we find that the challenge lies not so much in adding new content, but rather in designing curriculum processes that achieve a holistic overview. Strengthening the use of learning objectives as a dynamic monitoring and alignment tool offers a concrete opportunity to integrate rapidly changing knowledge holistically.