Medical Schools Receive a Message: Reform Yourselves, Then Take on Health Care System

MEDICAL SCHOOLS may need to become more active in health care reform, first by reforming themselves. Outmoded department structures and relationships, didactic lectures, hospital-based teaching, and patient care financing all may be contributing to the health care crisis by promoting expensive, sub-specialist, high-technology interventions late in disease at the expense of primary care and prevention. These are among points made by speakers at a conference on the future of medical education, held at the University of Chicago (Ill). AMA Looks to 21st Century (While medical educators are pondering these points, the American Medical Association's Section on Medical Schools will be meeting the first weekend in December at the Las Vegas Nev Hilton Hotel. Among other things, attendees will hear a keynote address on "Medicine in the 21st Century.") At the future of medical education conference, one of the speakers—Alvin R. Tarlov, MD—said that the 20th century shift from acute infectious