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Motif
Adaptability
Whether an expertise built today still works in 2050.
Adaptability sits beneath the other motifs. Identity becomes fluid and plural across a career; training must cultivate graduates who can still function when the ground moves, through designed variability, simulation, cross-domain rotation, and assessment that rewards revision.
Where it runs — 13 sections
I. Introduction
- Futurism in Biomedicine: The Mosaic MetaphorChange of this kind does not arrive as a revolution, with the world one way in one moment and another way the next. Nor does it arrive as an evolution, through intermediate states that emerge in stages and leave ample time to react.
- Arc of Medicine: Historical ThreadsThe first traces the ebb and flow of medical schools. The second follows the regulatory sphere of organized medicine, its boards, its societies, and its licensing structures. The third recounts the history of teaching hospitals and residencies.
- Physicians Evolving: Hippocrates 1.0 – 4.0Medicine has reorganized itself perhaps three times in its recorded history, and we are now inside a fourth.
- The Hippocrates 4.0 Physician: Plural and Fluid IdentitiesThe overarching view of the future physician advanced here is one of diversified identities and roles.
- The Attitude of This ReportFirst, this report approaches the question of the future physician from an entirely different plane. It does not ask which tasks will survive automation, nor how to defend existing scope.
VI. New Modes of Physicianship: A Collective of Experts
- Intelligences Meet: The Human AdvantageEven if AI superintelligence is achieved, a compelling human niche will persist.
- Recasting Physicians in the Age of Machine Intelligence: Guardian of HealthRelating the human advantage to the biomedical sphere requires a frame, and the most useful is the meme of the physician as Guardian of Health.
- Four Physician Identities: Contours of the Hippocrates 4.0 PhysicianIn recasting the physician as guardian of health and as a member of a collective of experts, both claims concern standing: what the physician is for, and who answers for what.
XI. Minting the Hippocrates 4.0 Physician
- Hardwiring the Mid-21st Century Physician: The Future CurriculumThis report has considered throughout about what medicine is becoming, and it now turns to what must therefore be taught. A view of the evolving modes of medicine, and of the physician who will practice them, is a specification for training.
- The Simulation FrontierIf mentoring is the highest-yield structural change available to medical education, simulation is the highest-yield methodological one, and medical education currently uses it at a fraction of its capability.
- Revisiting Lifelong Learning: The Adaptable PhysicianThe century-old sequence of medical school, then residency and fellowship, then episodic continuing education is no longer the right structure for a forty-year or more career in a changing technoscience realm. The continuum should be reconfigured in several specific ways.
XII. Pursuing Interconnectedness
- Connecting Medical Academy, Organizations, and IndustryNo single institution controls the physician as a profession; dozens do, partially, and none is accountable for the whole.
- Cooperative Advancement of Medical EducationWhat holds for care and discovery holds for educational formation, and here the arithmetic is unusually plain.