Cost Conscious Care Scholar Program

Healthcare in the United States can be financially toxic. While insurance and pharmaceutical companies are often blamed, they are not exclusively responsible. Patients and providers have a slew of options when it comes to designing their healthcare plans: there are innumerable tests, medications, and services.

Two patients with the same medical condition and insurance may end up paying dramatically different rates for the same outcome, all because of the different services they might be presented with, and hence choose.

The goal of our certificate program is to cultivate a more equitable and affordable health system by training medical students to present financial realities in an informational and empowering way. The goal of cost conversations should be to strengthen the doctor-patient alliance, and clinical decision-making should be cost-considered, but not cost-centric.

Program Objectives

The objective of this program is to cultivate a more equitable and affordable health system by training medical students to present financial realities in an informational and empowering way.

More specifically, this program will:

• Introduce medical graduate students to concepts regarding high-value care and healthcare waste
• Catalyze grassroots, student-led initiatives to advance healthcare value in medical education and
• Improve medical student literacy regarding cost-of-care conversations.

The capstone project will give students an opportunity to apply their learnings practically and will challenge them to design an implementable tool to address healthcare waste in a specialty of their choice.

Scholar Program Learning Outcomes

• Students should be familiar with and understand the basic definitions associated with value-based healthcare and healthcare waste.
• Students should be able to comfortably have conversations with patients about cost-of-care. 
• Students should be able to apply the knowledge and skills they learned from each workshop to a specialty of their choice through the capstone project. 

Certificate Requirements

• Students will attend six high-value care workshops over the course of their first and second years of medical school. These workshops will lay the foundation for a capstone project. Students must complete their capstone by the end of their second or third year (depending on what year they started the certificate).
• Students must participate in all six workshops. If a student cannot attend a workshop, they must watch a recording of it to make up the work. Each workshop is roughly one hour long, with the exception being the virtual interactive workshop where students will complete modules from the Dell School of Medicine. The virtual interactive workshop has an estimated completion time of 2 hours and 45 minutes. 

How to Apply

Interested in applying or have additional questions? Please contact Dr. Kristina Henderson Lewis at khlewis@wakehealth.edu

Student Leadership