Integrating Health Systems Science in early undergraduate medical education: barriers to implementation and lessons learned

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Incorporating health systems science (HSS) into medical school curricula is important, but there are numerous barriers to implementation, including lack of prioritization of this content by students. We performed a pilot intervention to integrate HSS content with clinical skills in a Hospital Medicine preceptorship for first-year medical students, with a focus on student and faculty responses to the curriculum. Students responded to surveys about their learning and experience with the curriculum, and faculty members described their experience working with the students. We identified multiple barriers to implementation, the largest being that students were reluctant to spend time on HSS content and preferred to focus on traditional clinical skills. This empiric study of student-perceived barriers to uptake of HSS content confirms prior studies that have anticipated but not tested for the presence of these specific, student-framed barriers in practice.