Innovative Leadership Fundamental for Future Health Professionals

The world is facing critical health challenges across many domains. Addressing global issues of cost, access and quality will require new and innovative approaches to our healthcare systems, infrastructure, and human capital. To lead this response, we will need a new type of health professional, one with strong leadership skills, disruptive long-term thinking, and the ability to build global functional networks. 

We are victims of our success. Never have human beings lived so long or in such large numbers because of reducing and, in some cases, eliminating infectious diseases, preventing premature deaths, as well as improving sanitary conditions, such as access to drinking water. Anyone likely knows of someone who has or has suffered from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or any other chronic condition. This confronts us with the appearance of chronic-degenerative diseases.

Today, a paradigm shift in medical thinking is occurring, where true success is no longer just curing disease, but maintaining health. Continuous discoveries, the advancement of new technologies, innovations in the combined use of existing ones, as well as longevity, are promoting patient empowerment and focusing on how we prevent, diagnose and cure diseases. We can already glimpse the future through advances such as health wearables; the Internet of Things on devices; augmented and virtual reality in training, diagnosis, and care; artificial intelligence in clinical decision support; robotics in assistance; genomic analysis causing personalized and precision treatment, as well as 3D impressions of tissues and organs.

Consequently, the patient will be able to be a manager of his own well-being, since he will have information about himself in real time; the doctor will not have to be in large hospitals to be decisive, since he will have at hand high-tech devices, interconnected and with access to intelligent systems that facilitate decision-making.

As the healthcare market changes, so are the capabilities physicians need to best practice medicine and serve their patients. The future of medical education holds many possibilities. Each possibility will unfold in different ways and at different paces for different people and organizations. Medical education is in an era of transformation, and medical schools are beginning to innovate to prepare new physicians for the emerging new model of care. The way we learned yesterday is insufficient for learning today. The experience of those who learned yesterday does not necessarily serve us today and will hardly serve us tomorrow.  

Good medical education should not only consider knowledge and technical and surgical skills, but also train students and doctors in all aspects of professional competence, such as professionalism, communication skills, teamwork, and leadership.

Students must be trained to develop competencies that prepare them to face an uncertain, complex environment with unlimited possibilities. This requires medical schools to educate students beyond theoretical knowledge and train them, in addition, to develop a series of generic skills that allow them to face their future professional reality. According to the context of the skills to be developed, competencies are classified as disciplinary and transversal or generic.

An evolving market environment is demanding new competencies, like business acumen, data analytics skills, and broadened interpersonal relationship skills, including enhanced communication and leadership skills.

Medical education has evolved through several stages. The most recent, systems-based learning, involves an analysis of complex perspectives and adapting them to patient needs. From this notion, the concept of perspectives for patient-centered learning emerges. It includes four dimensions: human, biomedical, managerial, and entrepreneurial.

The entrepreneurship perspective is about what should change. It is the perspective that allows the understanding of the context in which the individual is immersed with the possibility of extrapolating it to groups or populations seeking to understand the social determinants of health and extend the solutions for the achievement of a social transformation.

Leadership is about creating new realities. It involves creating an environment in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in world events. Leadership exists when people cease to be victims of circumstances and actively participate in the creation of new circumstances. It involves learning to shape the future. We are talking about innovation.

Trying to build a strong culture of innovation without effective leadership is like trying to build a building without the foundations. Strong leadership is key to fruitful innovation production and must be carefully considered to maximize successes. Innovation leadership is the ability to inspire productive actions in yourself and others during times of creation, invention, uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk.

Our challenge as an institution of higher education is how we develop the talent that will face this challenge and create new opportunities to develop society and increase the health levels of the population. We need to develop leaders in the health sector. Medical and health sciences schools need to develop the concept of self-leadership in their students. This concept is defined as the capacity for intentional and conscious influence on one's own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors with the aim of achieving the personal goals we have set ourselves. The new reality of a post-pandemic world is asking for leaders that improve not just the health indicators but the human condition.