Innovation in Medical Education

Dr. Ehrenfeld is a nationally recognized education who serves as Senior Associate Dean at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He was a former co-investigator on a $1 million grant from the AMA designed to facilitate innovation in medical education.

At Vanderbilt, he led efforts to embed students in the health care workplace, enabling students to become team members at a single clinical site for the duration of their undergraduate medical education. In this program, students used their own competency-based performance data to complete self-assessments. This data is helped them devise individualized learning goals and objectives, which linked to a learning management system and Vanderbilt’s electronic health record. With competency-based progression, some students will ultimately be able to complete medical school in less than four years.

Dr. Ehrenfeld previously served as a course director for the Vanderbilt Foundation of Healthcare Delivery Course, was Director of the Vanderbilt LGBT Health Graduate Certificate Program, and co-directed the Foundations of Health Information Technology course in the Vanderbilt Master in Applied Clinical Informatics Program.

Click here to learn about the AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education Grant

Teaching

For the past decade, Dr. Ehrenfeld has participated in didactic and clinical teaching across the entire educational continuum, from premedical students to advanced clinicians. He has received several teaching awards, including the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from Harvard Medical School.

He mentors undergraduate students in a structured summer clinical research program, precepts first year medical students in the operating room, and lectures in several graduate and undergraduate courses across the three Universities where he holds faculty appointments.

Dr. Ehrenfeld’s evaluations from students have included comments such as “Dr. Ehrenfeld seemed genuinely concerned with making sure that we learned the material and that we enjoyed tutorial” and “Dr. Ehrenfeld was a great tutorial leader and he went out of his way to make the sessions enjoyable for us. I learned a lot from him and truly enjoyed being in the group with him.” Within his department, he is consistently rated a top educator, and lectures in the core resident curriculum where his lectures routinely received some of the highest lecture ratings and has been one of a small number of faculty to receive perfect clinical teaching evaluations  (5 out of 5 in all categories).