In 1965, a young physician in Rochester, New York, was tasked with something radical: to build a new department of medicine from scratch. Dr. George Engel didn’t want to simply replicate the standard biomedical model, which carved patients into parts and organs and diseases. Instead, he proposed something quietly revolutionary — the biopsychosocial model. Patients weren’t just clusters of symptoms. They were people, whose lives, communities, and emotions shaped their health as much as their biology.
It was bold. It was disruptive. And it was easy to overlook as quackery. The decades that followed were dominated by organ-based specialization, by machines that could see deeper and blood tests that could measure more. The human being at the center of Engel’s vision slowly dissolved into the EMR, scattered across tabs and drop-down menus, buried deep in the shadows of technology.
Today, we are reckoning with the consequences.
We live inside a fragmented system, where uncertainty surrounds even basic medical needs like vaccines, where prescription drug costs rise unchecked, and where patients are too often lost in record systems that do not communicate with one another. It is no wonder that trust in health care is disintegrating. It is no wonder that burnout has become a badge of survival among clinicians.
And yet, something is stirring.
Across the country, medical schools are quietly reinventing themselves, borrowing from the spirit of Engel while applying the tools of the 21st century. Their innovations are not just tweaks in curriculum but fundamental reframings of what it means to be a doctor.
The Carle Illinois Experiment: Medicine Meets Engineering
Imagine for a moment that your medical education began not with gross anatomy but with design thinking. At the Carle Illinois College of Medicine — the world’s first “engineering-based” medical school — students are taught to approach patient care like engineers solving a design problem. The idea is simple but profound: If you train future physicians to think like problem-solvers, they won’t just practice medicine; they’ll reinvent it.
It’s easy to be dazzled by this model. Students at Carle Illinois prototype new devices, harness data analytics, and collaborate with engineers to create solutions as much as diagnoses. This approach appeals to our obsession with innovation as technology — shiny, disruptive, futuristic.
But is problem-solving enough?
Innovation, after all, is not just about devices or apps. Sometimes the problem in medicine isn’t that the stethoscope isn’t sensitive enough, but that the physician holding it never looks their patient in the eye.
Dell Medical School: Medicine Meets Leadership
In Austin, Texas, Dell Medical School set out with a manifesto: “Rethink everything.” Dell places a strong emphasis on value-based care, leadership, and community partnership. Students are immersed not just in anatomy labs and wards, but in projects that aim to improve population health and health care delivery at the systems level.
Mentors have traded in the ivory tower model with community clinics, nonprofits, and real-world health care systems. Students graduate not only with clinical skills but also with a sense that they are part of something larger: reshaping how health care is delivered to entire communities.
If Carle Illinois leans toward technology as innovation, Dell leans toward systems as innovation. Yet the question remains: In building better systems, how do we keep the focus on the individual patient, the person who sits before us, waiting to be heard? Are we lumping our patients into a broader-based system to make the model work?
NYU and Penn State: The Promise of Speed
Innovation, in another corner of U.S. medical education, is measured in time. NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Penn State College of Medicine have developed three-year MD pathways, with direct entry into primary care residency. The pitch is compelling: less debt, faster entry into the workforce, and perhaps less attrition from burnout.
But there is still a paradox in this model. Shortening the path to practice may solve one problem — financial debt — while worsening another: the erosion of time spent in human connection. If the most precious resource in medicine is not money but attention, then a faster, more compressed pathway risks depleting it even further.
Vermont: The End of the Lecture
Then there is Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, which has eliminated lectures entirely. Every student participates in active learning. No more passively sitting in the back row while a professor projects endless PowerPoint slides. Instead, students engage, debate, and apply knowledge in real time in small didactic groups.
It’s a provocative shift, one that reflects the neuroscience of learning itself: People retain what they do, not just what they hear. But beyond this teaching method, there is something symbolic about ending the era of the lecture. This signals a move away from medicine as passive absorption of facts toward the practice of medicine as lived, shared, dynamic.
Still, active learning is not inherently human centered. One can just as easily apply it to memorizing drug mechanisms as to practicing the art of listening.
The Alice L. Walton School: Whole Humanism
And then there is Bentonville, Arkansas, where the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine is opening its doors with a philosophy that feels, in many ways, like a return to Engel’s original vision. Their model emphasizes integrating art, the humanities, and humanism into medicine. Students will learn not only from cadavers and cases, but also from works of art and moments of reflection. They will be taught to notice, to interpret, and to empathize.
This is not nostalgia. It is not sentimentality. It is innovating in a different way — the idea that the most advanced technology in medicine is still the ability to listen.
Think about it. A physician who pauses to observe a patient’s body language may detect joint stiffness before any identifiable lab abnormalities. A clinician who listens without interruption may uncover the real cause of a patient’s chronic pain. These are not high-tech interventions, but they can change the trajectory of a life.
In an era when algorithms promise precision and apps promise efficiency, the Walton School’s method deigns that attention to the whole is the scarce resource worth teaching.
The Paradox of Innovation
We live in a time when “innovation” is almost always equated with technology. The new drug, the new device, the new platform. But innovation in medicine has another lineage — one that asks us to return to the basics, to see the patient as a whole.
The irony is that while our system struggles with fragmentation — vaccines uncertain, prescriptions unaffordable, records incompatible — the true innovation may not be in building more complex systems but in making them simpler. The innovation may not be in accelerating time-to-degree but in slowing down long enough to notice what is already in front of us. Pattern recognition over and over again takes time.
This is the lesson that unites Engel’s biopsychosocial model with the Walton School’s vision: Medicine advances not when it moves faster, but when it sees deeper.
A Story of Two Patients
Consider two patients. The first is a middle-aged man with hypertension, seen in a clinic that prides itself on efficiency. His blood pressure is recorded, his medications are adjusted, and he is discharged in under 10 minutes. The system works. The metrics are met.
The second patient is similar, but his doctor takes a different approach. She asks about his stress levels, notices the slump in his shoulders, the way his eyes flutter and do not make direct contact with her. She listens, without interrupting, as he describes the loss of his job. She refers him not only to cardiology, but to counseling and a community program for support. The encounter takes 20 minutes instead of 10.
Which visit was innovative? The one that optimized time — or the one that transformed it?
Returning to the Fundamentals
Medical schools today stand at a crossroads. Carle Illinois is training engineer-physicians. Dell is training leader-physicians. NYU and Penn State are training faster-physicians. Vermont is training active-learners.
And Alice L. Walton School of Medicine? They are focusing on training something rarer: physicians who notice. Physicians who listen. Physicians who understand that medicine is not just about the body in parts, but the human being in full. We will see how this plays out in the coming years.
That is an innovation worth paying attention to.
Because if we do not, we risk building a health care system that is ever more efficient, ever more technologically dazzling, and yet ever less human. We risk producing doctors who can navigate an EMR but not a patient’s silence, who can recite pathways but not read a face. We are not trying to make AI replace us, but in the current system, it is possible that it can replace some of us.
The future of medicine does not hinge only on what we can measure, but on what we can perceive. Do we want to be robots, or humans?
A Call To Reframe
Innovation in medicine must be reframed. It must mean more than the newest app or the fastest pathway. It must mean returning to the skills that are hardest to quantify: curiosity, presence, attention.
The next generation of medical schools — each in their own way — are testing this reframing. Some through technology. Some through systems. Some through learning models. And some, like the Alice L. Walton School, through the radical insistence that medicine is, at its core, about human beings.
As physicians, educators, and patients, we would do well to listen to each other.
What kind of innovation should guide the future of medical education? Share in the comments.
Dr. Brittany Panico is a rheumatologist in Phoenix, AZ. She is a wife and mother of three awesome boys and enjoys hiking, being outdoors, traveling, and reading. She posts on @AZRheumDoc on Instagram and Brittany Panico, DO, on LinkedIn. Dr. Panico was a 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 Doximity Op-Med Fellow and continues as a 2025–2026 Doximity Op-Med Fellow.
Illustration by Diana Connolly
