Actionable companion · School leadership and instructional improvement

From leadership research to district action: The Need for Health Care Innovation Training in Medical Education

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract The rapid transformation of the health care landscape requires physicians to not only be skilled clinically but also navigate and lead a highly dynamic, innovation-driven environment. This also provides an avenue for physicians to significantly enhance their ability to help their patients, through participation in health innovation projects. Despite this growing need and opportunity, few medical schools provide formal training in innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E). In this perspective, we examine the need for I&E education in medical curricula by exploring student interest, effective program models, and implementation strategies. To better understand medical student interest in innovation and willingness to participate in I&E programs during medical school, we surveyed 480 medical students at our institution, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and received 90 responses with a 19% response rate. We observed a strong interest in health care I&E, with 97% (87/90) of respondents valuing knowledge or experience in I&E and 63% (56/90) expressing intent to incorporate I&E into their careers. To assess the real-world impact of I&E education on medical professionals, we surveyed 12 alumni of the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID) Master’s program who had also completed medical school. Graduates reported that their experiences cultivated transferable skills—design thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and leadership—that shaped their professional trajectories. We propose three models for incorporating I&E education into existing medical curricula—short-term workshops, one-year gap programs, and longitudinal tracks—and discuss their advantages and trade-offs. Early and structured exposure to I&E education in medical school empowers students to identify unmet clinical needs, collaborate across disciplines, and develop real-world solutions. As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, integration of I&E education into medical curricula offers a timely opportunity for medical schools to cultivate physician leaders in this space.

A 90-day district inquiry

1. Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
2. Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
3. Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
4. Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Lily Zhu; Jeffrey Khong; Oren Wei; Katherine C Chretien; Youseph Yazdi. The Need for Health Care Innovation Training in Medical Education. JMIR Medical Education (2025-12-19). https://doi.org/10.2196/79489

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.