Introducing Clinical Learning, Reimagined

I’m excited to announce the launch of "Clinical Learning, Reimagined" — a space for creative conversation about what’s emerging and how we can step in and shape it together. 

BLOG SERIES: The Future of Clinical Learning

This series comes from a quiet reckoning I have watched build for two decades at the intersection of clinical education, technology, and the educators working together to solve real problems. I have heard it in the voices of faculty who went into academic medicine for the love of teaching and now find themselves doing everything but that. Test prep culture is crowding out clinical reasoning and learning from patients. Assessment measures rote learning without seeing the whole emerging clinician underneath. Promising technology keeps arriving faster than the field can absorb it. Across five posts, The Future of Clinical Learning makes the case that the moment for a critical course correction has arrived. It begins with thinking like this:

"I like to imagine what if we had infinite time with students to give feedback … and take them deeper and deeper and deeper into their learning. What would we do then? And could we create that to start with, so that when students then come to the clinic they would already be way above and beyond where we currently expect them to be, and now they just get to practice something that they have already started to hone?"

Amit Shah, MD, AGSF, FACP
Assistant Professor, Mayo Clinic

True clinical learning is worth fighting for, especially right now. AI is arriving as a profound disruptive force, yet it equally gives us a genuine opportunity to rebuild clinical learning on the foundations we know are strong. I did not choose 'reimagined' because anyone has a tidy vision of where we are headed. This is an invitation to the white board at a genuine threshold moment for our collective imagination. The educators closest to the work are the ones best positioned to define the problems and reimagine the solutions. Not administrators. Not politicians. Not technologists. Educators. Now is the time to show up and speak up for a field we are deeply passionate about.

The question is not whether clinical learning will keep changing; it already is. The question is whether we will do the imagining, or let it be done for us. 

This is our work. This is our passion. I am glad you are here to reimagine it with me.

PODCAST: Clinical Learning, Reimagined 

That same conviction now has a voice. Clinical Learning, Reimagined — The Podcast grew out of a simple observation: our thinking is better when it's in dialogue and when it's courageously shared. The most useful ideas I have ever had did not come from a journal article, a conference keynote, or even my own white board. They came from a conversation, often an unexpected one, with an innovative educator who was quietly wrestling and solving a problem while the rest of us trudged on.

Those conversations, and those brave educators, are why I created this podcast.

Each month, I will sit down with an educator, researcher, or innovator who is testing a bold idea, challenging a comfortable assumption, or building something new in the middle of remarkable change and uncertainty. The aim isn't a formal interview: I want this to feel more like the best conversation you had at a conference — the one that happens at the poster session, or in the hallway after the keynote is over, when people stop presenting and start talking about what actually happened. 

Consider this your standing invitation to pull up a chair and join in. 

 PLAYBOOK: Clinical Education Consistency

This same thinking is shaping a practical companion resource. Aquifer's Clinical Education Consistency Playbooks offer you and your colleagues frameworks for ensuring learners receive the highest-quality, comparable opportunities to build core knowledge, clinical reasoning and competencies, and professional readiness, even amid the necessary variability of different patients, preceptors, and practice settings. 

Come find the blog, the podcast, the playbooks, and what's ahead at Clinical Learning, Reimagined.