- Will Free Tuition Solve the Shortage?
- Med-Challenger Giveaway
- Licensing Path for Immigrant Physicians
- Use Your Stipend Wisely
- AI Scribes and Virtual Care
- Reasons to Choose Med-Challenger
- QUIZ- Test Your Knowledge
Will Free Medical School Tuition Solve the Doctor Shortage?
Everyone criticizes NYU’s report on its first tuition-free cohort. NYU is also the first to offer an accelerated (and tough) three-year medical school program. You can’t say they aren’t trying new things rapidly.
The tuition-free structure was a disappointment to those who believed it would open pathways for more doctors in community and primary care. In fact, the number of medical students opting for higher-paid specialties increased. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense because those entering medical school are at the far end of several filters that already suppress entry into medical training for physicians. Bachelor of Science degrees, high standardized test scores, high school GPAs, college GPAs, MCAT scores, and financial barriers all combine to limit applicants.
What they wanted to achieve with tuition-free medical school was accomplished, in part: physicians who are not driven by overhanging education debt. But if they want to capture more people for higher medical training, they’ll have to start earlier.
Will Free Medical School Tuition Solve the Doctor Shortage?
Massachusetts Offers New Licensing Path to Immigrant Physicians
Another state is offering a path to practice for immigrant physicians from equivalent licensing and medical education regimes. Most of the states that have implemented these pathways have opted for requiring two to three years of supervised practice in a hospital or equivalent environment. Massachusetts, however, is implementing a three- to six-year mentorship at community health centers or hospitals.
As Tennessee found, however, just because legislators create a law doesn’t mean the State Medical Board will go along with it. In some states, laws may need to be revised to secure the cooperation of licensing and certification boards.
Massachusetts Offers New Licensing Path to Immigrant Physicians - Beckers Hospital Review
2025 Outlook: What's next for AI Scribes and Virtual Care
AI voice transcription is near-perfect in a quiet environment. Which is great and all - it’s promising to be a real boon to the workflow of recording patient status, hand-offs, treatment and notes. But there’s been a troubling trend with implementation in EHRs, which seem to be aimed more at recording and summarizing patient interactions and correcting for accuracy. Patient notes are where the doctor, or clinician, utilizes training and experience to document treatment plan and response, and are a communication tool.
They aren’t a billing tool, or that shouldn’t be the focus of AI-based transcription. AI-based transcription (just like human transcription) can have contextual errors and poor reliability in noisy environments. The impetus behind some of the EHR charting based transcription seems to be reflective of billing priorities.
The dozens of AI scribe companies on the market now offer a lot of useful charting tools that speed up workflows and allow better capture of physician thoughts. The stuff that’s being put into EHRs doesn’t have the same aim. We’re skeptical about AI transcription because it has a lot of ways to go wrong and not be a benefit to the patient. We’re bullish on several forms of virtual care, however, despite some of the arcane billing necessities built into them.
2025 Outlook: What's next for AI Scribes and Virtual Care - Fierce Healthcare
 QUIZ QUESTION
34-year-old gravida 1 para 0 presents with a complaint of abdominal pain
A 34-year-old gravida 1 para 0 presents with a complaint of abdominal pain. It is a vague, achy sort of pain that "comes and goes." She notes that her period should have come about 2 weeks earlier, but it did not. She has also noticed some irregular vaginal spotting. You perform ultrasonography (see figure). See Figure
Assuming the embryo in this picture demonstrates cardiac activity, ultrasonography shows the most specific sonographic sign of an ectopic pregnancy. If this is not seen, which of the following is the next most specific sonographic sign of ectopic pregnancy?
-decidual cyst within endometrial cavity
-complex pelvic fluid
-complex or solid adnexal mass separate from the ovary
-extrauterine gestational sac containing a yolk sac with or without an embryo
-tubal ring without an embryo or yolk sac
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