Jun 30, 2026 · 20 min · 9 segments
Over the past several years, contextualizing care has surfaced repeatedly on On Becoming a Healer. In 2025, contextualizing care was incorporated into new Foundational Competencies for Undergraduate…
Okay, now in this third excerpt, I provide a brief description of the IHI course on contextualizing care.
This is from a conversation we recorded last year when Stefan interviewed me just after we finished producing the course.
I have been working over the last year with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement or IHI, which is very well known to medical schools.
It's kind of one of the best known organizations that advocates for quality of care and that develops resources to improve quality of care.
And I've worked with them over the last year to develop approximately three-hour module that can be broken in.
It's actually five modules, but it's a three-hour course that is entitled Contextualizing Care for the Clinician.
And at each point, there are exercises where you get to practice what you're being taught and see if you are effectively contextualizing care.
And this course is very, based on the many studies that we've done on the key strategies to contextualizing care that are effective and that are most likely to drive better outcomes.
Now, there have always been those who say that the medical school curriculum is so packed that there's not room to add anything.
Somewhat rhetorically here, Stefan poses that question to me, which gives me an opportunity to vent a little bit.
Usually there's a fight at medical schools about how much time to give to things in the curriculum.
Everybody's got their piece and it's like, you know, in the second year, we're going to give endocrine this many weeks and we're going to give musculoskeletal that many weeks.
Does this become a competing piece that somehow is going to now have to fight against neurology and endocrinology in order to get a piece of it? Or can it be, how's it going to fit?
To me, the idea that we would argue over whether to spend three hours of a four year curriculum on doing something that is foundational to being a physician and is essential to almost every medical encounter.
that we know affects patient healthcare outcomes and that doctors are currently not doing very well.
So the idea that we would have to argue over three hours for that is to me, frankly, bizarre.
I do know people get into that like, well, do we really have three hours of time? I'm like, I mean, give me a break.
And again, we've had other episodes where we've talked about how much stuff is force fed to medical students from areas of basic science that none of us remember or ever use.
So yeah, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for any medical school that would say, well, gosh, we're just too busy with biochemistry cycles that our students have to have down pat to spend any time talking about.
how you effectively take patient life circumstance and behavior into account when planning patient care.
I think the other thing that's often assumed is that, oh, well, you know, this is kind of common sense.
Okay, now in this third excerpt, I provide a brief description of the IHI course on contextualizing care.
This is from a conversation we recorded last year when Stefan interviewed me just after we finished producing the course.
I have been working over the last year with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement or IHI, which is very well known to medical schools.
It's kind of one of the best known organizations that advocates for quality of care and that develops resources to improve quality of care.
And I've worked with them over the last year to develop approximately three-hour module that can be broken in.
It's actually five modules, but it's a three-hour course that is entitled Contextualizing Care for the Clinician.
And at each point, there are exercises where you get to practice what you're being taught and see if you are effectively contextualizing care.
And this course is very, based on the many studies that we've done on the key strategies to contextualizing care that are effective and that are most likely to drive better outcomes.
Now, there have always been those who say that the medical school curriculum is so packed that there's not room to add anything.
Somewhat rhetorically here, Stefan poses that question to me, which gives me an opportunity to vent a little bit.
Usually there's a fight at medical schools about how much time to give to things in the curriculum.
Everybody's got their piece and it's like, you know, in the second year, we're going to give endocrine this many weeks and we're going to give musculoskeletal that many weeks.
Does this become a competing piece that somehow is going to now have to fight against neurology and endocrinology in order to get a piece of it? Or can it be, how's it going to fit?
To me, the idea that we would argue over whether to spend three hours of a four year curriculum on doing something that is foundational to being a physician and is essential to almost every medical encounter.
that we know affects patient healthcare outcomes and that doctors are currently not doing very well.
So the idea that we would have to argue over three hours for that is to me, frankly, bizarre.
I do know people get into that like, well, do we really have three hours of time? I'm like, I mean, give me a break.
And again, we've had other episodes where we've talked about how much stuff is force fed to medical students from areas of basic science that none of us remember or ever use.
So yeah, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for any medical school that would say, well, gosh, we're just too busy with biochemistry cycles that our students have to have down pat to spend any time talking about.
how you effectively take patient life circumstance and behavior into account when planning patient care.
I think the other thing that's often assumed is that, oh, well, you know, this is kind of common sense.
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