Human-Centered Design in Health Professions Education

The health professions education community has advocated for the implementation of a new educational paradigm, competency-based medical education (CBME), driven partially by increased demands for accountability from the public and various stakeholders and informed by the best practices of the learning sciences. Rather than the traditional ‘apprenticeship model’ of health professions education, which is idiosyncratic and is associated with variable learner outcomes, CBME promises standardization and increased validity of training methods and assessment that should translate into improvements in patient outcomes. Despite the recognition of the importance of CBME, competency-based approaches face many hurdles in terms of defining, measuring, and improving competencies. In this introductory chapter, we outline an approach to human-centered design in health professions education that is informed by the learning and cognitive sciences.