Why 'one more training day' doesn’t work anymore

Half-day seminars and slide decks are a tough sell in an era when clinicians can’t afford to leave the exam room.

In an interview with Physicians Practice, AMGA President and CEO Jerry Penso, M.D., MBA, and Practicing Excellence founder Stephen Beeson, M.D., argue that traditional, top-down training is missing the moment because it pulls clinicians away from patients without giving them practical help when it counts.

Physicians Practice: Let’s get down to brass tacks. “AI-powered human development” can mean a lot of things. In plain terms, what’s different? What will feel different for a physician or a practice leader using this platform versus traditional training?

Jerry Penso, MD, MBA, President and CEO of AMGA: Let me cover traditional training and why it doesn’t meet the moment, and why this solution is different and unique in the marketplace.

Traditional training might be a half-day or all-day seminar. People have to get out of their offices, out of their practices, where they’re not seeing patients. It’s lectures, PowerPoint, really kind of top-down leadership telling you what to do. That sort of training isn’t working anymore.

What clinicians really want is something that fits into their workflow, that doesn’t take them away from their clinical practice, but can be integrated in the moment into the challenges they’re facing. That’s what Practicing Excellence has really developed. I’ll let Steve talk about some real-world examples where this is being effective.

Stephen Beeson, M.D., founder of Practicing Excellence: There are so many incredible impacts of AI on the prospects of human development. A good friend and colleague once said to me: In the past, in the human development space, content was king. Now context is king.

What I mean by that is the learning and development strategies that are deployed have to be personalized to the learner, their role, their experience, their ambitions, their accountabilities, their interests. It has to help them do two things.

First, the learning experience has to help them become contributory to what the organization wants to become. How we are with patients, how we are for each other, how we’re leading, the safety behaviors we’re creating, whatever the behaviors are that allow them to contribute to enterprise goals. Historically, learning has not translated into human behavioral change. It creates lots of learning and certifications and completions, but it doesn’t translate into, “I’m changing what I do for patients, for colleagues and as a leader.” That’s the critical chasm learning has to meet right now.

Second, learning has to help them become contented in their work. When you finish a day as a really effective leader, mobilizing your team, and the team says, “Man, I feel seen, heard and valued here,” that’s a different experience. Or a clinician learns how to interact with a patient and, at the end of the encounter, the patient says, “I’ve never had a physician say these kinds of things to me. You have no idea the impact you’re making.” We know health care needs more of that right now.

Contextualized, personalized, in-the-moment learning, as opposed to going to a classroom miles away, allows you to learn while you’re working, using technology-enabled, AI-personalized, contextualized learning. It’s a really powerful prospect.

And historically, learning has been a cohort, a group, a class. We want to democratize learning so everyone learns, and technology enables that. It allows scalable, personalized, contextualized learning that also maps to key organizational imperatives, and that’s what some of the technology allows the learning experience to become.

JP: Let me just build on that. Steve and I are both physicians. We both trained in the typical physician training mode, “see one, do one, teach one.” You learned from older physicians’ experience. They watched you, taught you, and then you were doing it, and you learned by doing.

That model had its value in its day, but health care has so many more imperatives now, and organizations really need to invest in their physician employees and their physician workforce in different ways. That old way isn’t working anymore. We need a physician workforce that can adapt to the rapidly changing health care environment, and for that you need a new type of tool. That’s where I’m really excited about where Practicing Excellence can fit that need.