Continuous Improvement: A Core Value at OCOM
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
I am a big believer that excellence is not a state of being, but rather a state of becoming. If you are doing something that was excellent 5 or 10 years ago, there is a good chance that it is not excellent anymore. In biology, if you are not growing, you are dying. I think this is an important lesson for continuous improvement in each of our personal and professional lives.
I also believe that the Status Quo Bias is an enemy to being an excellent medical school and is probably the enemy to most organizations. I have been in medical education over 20 years and I have seen medical schools not continuously improve and not keep up with current medicine and medical education. The challenge with this is that faculty and staff get frustrated and try to make some huge overhaul to modernize and then go through all of the frustrations of change management in a huge change. The solution to this is to make continuous improvement as part of the DNA of an organization (as well as in our personal lives).
I have been fascinated with Moore’s Law, where Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) predicted that the number of transistors on microprocessors would double over a couple of years. This prediction has held true and computer processing has grown exponentially over this period of time and the pace seems to continue limitlessly. We have seen this in our lives. For example, 20 years ago, the iPod was the most popular consumer electronic device in the world. In many ways, the iPhone and smartphone technology made it obsolete and Apple discontinued the iPod in 2022 with little fanfare. It seems that our society has become comfortable and even expects continuous improvement in all things and I think it is important for medical schools and other organizations to actively pursue.
At OCOM, continuous improvement and innovation is one of our core values. While we are a young organization, we want to hardwire this into our DNA. So far, it is working. At the time of this writing, we just finished up creating a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) updating how we coordinate facilitators, we are working on some customer service initiatives that will improve the experience of interviews for the Class of 2030 (our third class), and the chairs implemented a new process of updating the courses for the following year. Steve Jobs was often touted for leading Apple to create the iPhone, but he felt that the best product that he developed was the team at Apple. He appreciated the importance of the team and the culture to continuously innovate and improve. I am convinced of the same for OCOM.
