The American Medical Association (AMA) will soon release their new "Health Systems Science" textbook to help prepare students to become physicians who understand how patients receive and access care in today's healthcare systems. The focus of the text is on value in healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, teamwork and team science, leadership, clinical informatics, population health, socio-ecological determinants of health, healthcare policy and healthcare economics.

The AMA has recognized the shift in the healthcare delivery system toward value-based care and the need to alter what physicians know so they can more effectively practice in modern healthcare systems. It collaborated with its 32-school Consortium to identify the innovations needed to create the medical school of the future, and "Health Systems Science" emerged as the third pillar of medical education that should be integrated with the two existing pillars: basic and clinical sciences.

Together, the AMA and the 11 founding Consortium schools wrote the textbook to formalize this concept to help medical schools across the country teach their students the knowledge, skills and behaviors they will need to deliver care in the rapidly changing healthcare environment, while also understanding how patients receive and access that care.

Many schools within the Consortium have already begun implementing health systems science into their curricula and will soon use the textbook with their students, including Penn State College of Medicine and Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School.

The American Medical Association will soon release their new "Health Systems Science" textbook to help prepare students to become physicians who understand how patients receive and access care in today's healthcare systems.

Penn State College of Medicine launched its Systems Navigation Curriculum in 2014, collaborating with its health system leaders to design the new curriculum to meet the needs of the health system.

The program, which embeds first-year medical students working as patient navigators in clinical sites throughout central Pennsylvania, was created to ensure students learn not only the basic and clinical sciences, but also health systems science. This is an important innovation given that the majority of medical students still receive their training in hospital settings, despite the fact that the majority of patients are now being cared for in out-patient settings to treat chronic conditions.

Brown University created its Primary Care-Population Medicine program — awarding graduates both a Doctor of Medicine and a Master of Science in Population Medicine. The first-in-the-nation program is designed to develop physicians who, with training focused on population health, can be future leaders in community-based primary care at the local, state or national level.

"We know that the way healthcare is being delivered is changing, but until now those changes have not been widely incorporated into the way we teach our physicians. Our medical schools are very good at preparing students for the basic and clinical sciences that are paramount to providing care to patients, but what is largely missing is how to deliver that care in a complex health system," AMA CEO James L. Madara, M.D., said.

"By working together with our Consortium schools, we are taking the right steps to prepare tomorrow's physicians to be equipped to quickly adapt to the changing healthcare landscape and provide value-based care as soon as they enter practice."

The new textbook, published by Elsevier, will be officially available to all medical schools in mid-December. It will serve as a platform from which additional Health Systems Science tools and innovations can be shared throughout the nation's medical schools; helping medical students learn about the newest technologies, healthcare reforms and scientific discoveries.