Health sciences professors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

• Lecture1765–1893

  Lecture and anatomical demonstration (pre-laboratory era)

  The earliest American medical school faculty taught exclusively through lectures and anatomical dissection demonstrations. No microscopes, no chemistry laboratories, no clinical assignments: the professor stood at a podium and read from European texts, occasionally gesturing toward a cadaver on the dissecting table. Students took notes by hand. The same two-term curriculum repeated each year. One in twenty graduates had been within six feet of a living patient during their training. The primary tool of the trade was the academic lecture, modeled on European university tradition and requiring no institutional support beyond a room, a cadaver, and a paying audience.

• Teaching hospital + laboratory science1893–1945

  Teaching hospital + laboratory science (Johns Hopkins model, Flexner era)

  Johns Hopkins Medical School opened in 1893 with a model that William Osler would spend the next fifteen years evangelizing across American medicine: the teaching hospital as the primary classroom, the clinical clerkship as the core learning activity, and full-time salaried faculty who could devote themselves entirely to teaching and research rather than splitting their time with a private practice downtown. The Flexner Report of 1910 used Carnegie and Rockefeller money to reward schools that adopted this model and effectively starve those that did not. By 1935 more than half of the schools Flexner visited had closed or merged. The survivors invested in physiology and pathology laboratories, microscope rooms, and formal hospital affiliations. The faculty tool of this era was not a machine but a methodological transformation: the preclinical curriculum became laboratory-grounded science rather than transcribed lectures, and the clinical curriculum became apprenticeship under full-time expert supervision.

  Effect on the work

  The remaining schools invested in full-time faculty lines and laboratory infrastructure, creating the demand for the career academic physician that has defined the role ever since.

• NIH grant infrastructure + audiovisual…1945–1975

  NIH grant infrastructure + audiovisual teaching aids (postwar research-education integration)

  The National Institutes of Health began funding university-based biomedical research in earnest after World War II, transforming the role of health specialties faculty. By the early 1950s, NIH was distributing hundreds of millions of dollars annually in research grants to medical school faculty who now had a third job: securing and managing federal grants alongside teaching and clinical practice. Audiovisual aids -- 35mm slide projectors, 16mm film reels for surgical technique, overhead projectors -- arrived in medical school lecture halls through the 1950s and 1960s. The overhead projector became the dominant lecture tool from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s. Programmed learning texts (forerunners of question banks) and early cadaver simulation models appeared in anatomy and surgery curricula.

  Effect on the work

  The NIH grant expansion drove the faculty headcount at medical schools from 3,500 (1945) to 17,000 (1965), as schools hired research-productive faculty to compete for federal research dollars. Teaching was increasingly structured around this research mission: faculty who could not secure grants were often not promoted, creating the research-or-teach tension that defines academic medicine to this day.

• Standardized patients + OSCE examination1975–1995

  Standardized patients + OSCE examination (clinical skills assessment era)

  Standardized patient programs -- in which trained lay actors simulate patient presentations so students can practice history-taking and physical examination in a controlled setting -- were pioneered by Howard Barrows at the University of Southern California in the 1960s and spread widely through US medical schools in the 1970s and 1980s. The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) format, developed by Ronald Harden at the University of Dundee in 1975, gave faculty a structured way to assess clinical skills at multiple stations. By the 1990s the United States Medical Licensing Examination included a clinical skills component requiring standardized patient encounters; this made OSCE design and standardized patient training core faculty competencies. The OSCE and standardized patient program represented the first major technology of health-education assessment -- replacing the single-examiner oral clinical examination with a multi-station, multi-faculty assessment infrastructure.

• Learning management systems + digital q…1995–2015

  Learning management systems + digital question banks (ExamSoft, WebCT, Blackboard)

  WebCT launched in 1995 and Blackboard in 1997, giving health professions faculty their first platforms for posting lecture notes, assignments, and grades online. ExamSoft, founded in 1992, became the dominant digital exam platform at medical and dental schools through the 2000s, replacing paper-and-pencil examinations with computer-based testing that generated item analytics automatically. Digital question banks from the National Board of Medical Examiners and commercial providers (Kaplan, USMLEWorld, later BoardVitals) gave faculty ready-made formative assessment questions in USMLE-Step format. PowerPoint replaced the overhead projector as the universal lecture medium through the late 1990s. By 2005 virtually every US medical school course had an LMS presence, and by 2010 most had adopted some form of computer-based formative assessment. The faculty task that changed most was exam authoring: writing new questions was now documented, tracked, and benchmarked against item-difficulty statistics.

• High-fidelity simulation + virtual pati…2010–2022

  High-fidelity simulation + virtual patient platforms (SimMan, Aquifer, Osso VR)

  High-fidelity patient simulators -- programmable manikins that breathe, produce heart sounds, and can be programmed to deteriorate in response to student interventions -- became core infrastructure at US medical and nursing schools through the 2010s. Laerdal's SimMan and CAE Healthcare's HPS were the dominant platforms. Simultaneously, virtual patient case libraries (Aquifer, formerly Aquifer Medicine) delivered branching clinical-reasoning cases online; students could complete several virtual patient encounters outside of scheduled class time, freeing faculty supervision hours for the debrief and high-stakes direct observation. Osso VR (2016) and Touch Surgery (2013) extended this model to surgical procedural training. The effect on faculty was structural: simulation technology created a new job category within academic medicine -- simulation faculty or simulation center director -- and shifted routine skills-practice volume away from faculty-supervised time toward asynchronous platforms, allowing faculty to concentrate supervision on the highest-stakes clinical encounters.

• Generative AI for medical education2022–present

  Generative AI for medical education (ChatGPT Edu, BoardVitals AI, Osmosis AI, Elicit)

  The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and its rapid adoption by medical students and faculty marked a step-change in what health professions educators had to manage. By 2024 the AAMC had published formal guidance for faculty on AI in medical education, documenting that lecture content generation, clinical case vignette creation, USMLE-style question writing, and feedback on written student work were tasks where AI was already being deployed in health sciences programs. Simultaneously, tools like Elicit and Consensus began absorbing the literature-synthesis labor that previously consumed hours of faculty time per curriculum update cycle (medically relevant knowledge doubles roughly every few weeks, creating a perpetual update burden). BoardVitals AI and Osmosis AI began generating formative question items automatically, reducing the faculty effort required to maintain current exam banks by an estimated 40-60% per NEJM AI review evidence. Glass Health, which generates clinical differential diagnoses from brief patient summaries, made unobserved written clinical reasoning assignments largely untenable as valid assessment instruments, triggering widespread curriculum redesign toward direct observation. The core of the role remains structurally durable: LCME, ACGME, CCNE, and ACPE accreditation standards require faculty-of-record accountability for competency assessment that cannot legally be delegated to an AI system.

  Effect on the work

  The BLS employment growth projection for 2024-2034 suggests that AI augmentation is not displacing demand for health specialties teachers -- rather, the structural driver (a large and persistent US physician and allied-health workforce shortage) keeps demand for new graduates, and therefore the faculty who train them, elevated above any automation savings within the curriculum.