Kaiser Permanente School Of Medicine’s Outgoing CEO On How Technology Aids Student Learning

In 2020, Kaiser Permanente — the nonprofit healthcare conglomerate — opened the Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. Kaiser said the medical school, which serves 200 students in Pasadena, California, would aim to address health inequities and draw on its network of faculty resources in the health system to teach students.

Now, four years later, KPSOM is celebrating its first graduating class — and welcoming a new CEO. On July 1, John Dalrymple will take over as dean and CEO of the medical school, replacing founding dean and chief executive Mark Schuster, who will remain a professor at KPSOM.

Before his stint as CEO ends this summer and he embarks on a six-month sabbatical, Healthcare Dive spoke with Schuster to talk about the founding of the medical school and how it incorporates technology, like augmented and virtual reality, into the classroom.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HEALTHCARE DIVE: What was your approach to opening a new medical school?

MARK SCHUSTER: I was really attracted to the idea of a medical school focused on patient-centered care, population and community health, equity and inclusivity as well as the health and well-being of its students. There’s a lot of burnout and depression among medical students and physicians, and I thought it was great that the school would try to address that.

We spoke to experts all over the country, we read the research, all the opinion pieces on how to improve education. We learned what people were doing that was innovative in other areas, and we brought our best ideas and worked as a team to create the medical school.

We’re small, so we’re able to know the name of every student. We know where they’re from, what they’re interested in, and we try to make it a personalized experience here.

How are technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality powering simulations? What type of medical scenarios do students simulate?

In our Anatomy Resource Center, we’re using AR, and that’s been a great way for our students to learn anatomy.

When you are using a traditional cadaver and you remove the ribs, then you remove the lungs and you get to the heart, you cannot put the lungs back. With AR, you can put them back multiple times. You can spin the heart around and see it from all angles.

It is really an amazing technology for getting a deep understanding of anatomy, and the spatial relations, the 3D understanding that goes into thinking anatomically. We also can simulate ultrasound with AR, and so our students are able to practice doing ultrasound with a simulation before they are working with actual live patients.

We’re using VR in our Simulation Center. We have a da Vinci robot that enables our students to even practice cauterizing. They can perform surgery on the kidney with the robot, and it is all virtual. You can use the da Vinci robot to do real surgery, but you can also use it to train.

To what extent do immersive environments in AR and VR replace or supplement human cadavers or actors?

In a cadaver, it’s hard to see something called the brachial plexus, which is the technical term for nerves in the shoulder that run down to the arm, and it’s much easier to see them in AR.

We have actors who are “standardized patients.” There’s much that you get from a standardized patient that, at least right now, with AR and VR, we’re not there yet.

What artificial intelligence will do over time, we’ll see, but right now, our students are responding to facial expressions, body language and differences in speech patterns with our standardized patients, and there is an effort to create a connection and empathy. And you’re not getting that from augmented or virtual reality.

To what extent do you use AI at KPSOM?

We are integrating generative AI large language models into the curriculum, so our students are aware of the promise of [LLMs], the risks and areas of concern.

We want our students to be able throughout their careers to assess new technology and decide whether it will enhance their practice and be a benefit, or whether it will create more problems than benefits. So we are very much trying to bring AI into our curriculum and all new technologies that seem relevant to clinical care and clinical education.