The American Medical Association (AMA) announced that it will seek to triple the number of medical schools participating in its Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium, launched in 2013 to reshape medical education in the United States.

AMA will provide $1.5 million over the next three years to fund up to 20 additional projects that support a significant redesign of undergraduate medical education. Interested medical schools must submit their proposals by September 16, 2015, at www.changemeded.org.

The goal of the initiative is to work toward a significant redesign of undergraduate medical education so that it better aligns with the 21st century health care system.

The consortium was created by the AMA in 2013 with $11 million in grants awarded to 11 of the country’s top medical schools. Each school received a $1 million grant over five years, and together they are developing innovative curriculum models to help thousands of medical students better prepare for delivering care in the rapidly evolving health care landscape. In California, the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and the UC Davis School of Medicine were among the initial grantees.

The projects currently underway encompass many educational innovations, including models for student immersion within the health care system from day one of medical school and competency-based models enabling students to advance through medical school based on their own individualized learning plans.

“In such a short amount of time, our consortium schools have made impressive strides toward creating the medical school of the future. Many of the schools have already implemented new curriculum models that are supporting innovative training for 7,000 medical students who will one day care for more than 12.2 million patients each year,” said AMA President Steven J. Stack, M.D. “It is because of this tremendous progress that we’ve decided to collaborate with more medical schools and continue on the path to spreading innovation across the entire medical education system to close the gaps that exist between the way physicians are educated and how health care will be delivered in the future.”

As part of this second phase of the Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative, AMA is calling on medical schools to build upon and implement the education models created by the 11 founding consortium schools, as well as to offer unique projects that can be shared with medical schools nationwide.

Through a competitive grant process, a national advisory panel will evaluate submitted proposals and select projects that incorporate one of the following themes:

• Developing flexible, competency-based pathways
• Teaching and/or assessing new content in health care delivery science
• Working with health care delivery systems in novel ways
• Making technology work to support learning and assessment
• Envisioning the master adaptive learner
• Shaping tomorrow’s leaders

Projects that do not fall under one of these themes, but that provide a valuable contribution to the consortium, will also be considered.

Over the course of the initiative, AMA will continue to track and report on the progress of the medical schools’ collective work in order to identify and widely disseminate the best models for transformative educational change.

AMA has also created a summary report to highlight the current progress of the founding 11 consortium schools.

For more information, visit www.changemeded.org.