CHICAGO — The American Medical Association’s (AMA) new “Health Systems Science” textbook, which was first announced last month, is officially available for shipment starting tomorrow. Developed as part of the AMA’s ongoing effort to develop bold, innovative ways to improve physician training, the textbook will help physicians navigate the nation’s health care system as it moves toward value-based care.

“As part of the AMA’s initiative to create the medical school of the future, we collaborated with the nation’s leading medical schools to develop a formalized strategy and textbook that can be used by all medical schools to ensure that physicians in training can learn how to deliver care that meets the needs of patients in modern health systems,” said AMA CEO James L. Madara, M.D. “While our medical schools are very good at preparing students for the basic and clinical sciences that are paramount to providing care to patients, what is largely missing is how to deliver that care in a complex health system. We believe this new textbook will help fill that gap for medical students across the country.”

In recent years, the AMA collaborated with its 32-school Consortium to identify innovations, 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 a 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 health care environment while also understanding how patients receive and access that care.

The new “Health Systems Science” textbook focuses on value in health care, patient safety, quality improvement, teamwork and team science, leadership, clinical informatics, population health, socio-ecological determinants of health, health care policy and health care economics. 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.

While parts of the new “Health Systems Science” textbook have already been in use in several Consortium schools, it is now officially available to all medical schools across the country. The textbook, published by Elsevier, will serve as a platform from which the Consortium schools will build additional Health Systems Science tools and innovations that can be shared throughout the nation’s medical schools. The textbook is available for purchase at the AMA Store.

The AMA launched its Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative in 2013—providing $11 million in grants to fund major innovations at 11 of the nation’s medical schools. Together, these schools formed a Consortium that shares best practices with a goal of widely disseminating the new and innovative curricula being developed. The AMA expanded its Consortium in 2015 with grants to an additional 21 schools to develop new curricula that better align undergraduate medical education with the modern health care system.

The AMA will continue its efforts to accelerate change in medical education to ensure future physicians learn about the newest technologies, health care reforms and scientific discoveries that continue to alter what physicians need to know to practice in modern health care systems.

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