Medicine is changing fast. Yet, the way we train doctors is not changing nearly as fast. It’s reflected in an education system built for 20th century.

Over the past couple of days people began talking about it at a meeting called Medicine X | Ed. This is the first meeting to tackle the thorniest issues facing our next generation of doctors.

The meeting brought together patients, medical students, allied health professionals, and medical educators under roof. Medicine X Executive Director and founder began by asking participants to start by forgetting everything they knew about medical education. Our discussion reflected the most unique angles of training from the emerging role of inter professional education to information overload and medical students editing Wikipedia.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity of MedX | Ed is that it created a safe place to discuss how desperately things need to change. Disruption in medical education is undermined by a system designed to suppress change. And as noted by Clay Shirky, institutions will work to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Real change in meded will not come from current institutional structures but grassroots efforts.

And it starts with a conversation.

Regarding conversations, it’s worth noting that Stanford Medicine X is the most discussed academic medical meeting in the world. So when it looks to tackle medical education, you might expect key med ed stakeholders to participate. The wasn’t necessarily the case. The absence of medical education’s highest organizational leadership at MedX Ed may speak to the failure to hear what the world is saying.

Either way, Medicine X | began the conversation. To learn more about MedX | Ed, check out Wing of Zock and Amol Utrankar’s post. Stanford’s Scope Blog has some nice coverage here.