Taking Advantage of Convergence: The Carle Illinois College of Medicine

One of society’s greatest challenges today is how to provide better healthcare to more people at lower cost. While this challenge is daunting, we are actually at a very exciting place with enormous potential to develop more effective preventative measures, more targeted interventions, and personalized care driven through engineering, technology, and big data.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in partnership with the Carle Health System, is establishing the first ever College of Medicine that will focus expressly at the convergence of engineering, technology, big data, and medicine. We have two goals (1) re-invent health care around revolutionary advances in engineering and technology to further research, education, and health care delivery and (2) transform education of physicians through the development of team-based innovative approaches to achieving improved healthcare outcomes.

We will develop a totally new medical curriculum that infuses principles of engineering, technology, and big data into all courses and promotes innovation as a roadmap to the future of medicine. The team of faculty teaching each course will include basic scientists, medical physicians, and engineers. Instead of the traditional discipline-based approach, this curriculum will teach the human body as an integrated system that is critical to the development of analytical and problem-solving skills. Engineering technologies and approaches will be incorporated throughout the entire 4-year curriculum. For example, in the microbiology course, we will instill an understanding of microbes and engineering approaches to the alteration of the genome, epigenome, and biological circuits. The curriculum will include principles of data mining to patient care. In the clinical training, the curriculum will incorporate 3D printing and advanced analytical techniques and their application to healthcare. The curriculum will train a new generation of physician-engineers, physician-inventors, physician-discoverers and physician-scientists.

The future of medicine lies in discovering new sensors, materials, robotics, miniaturized imaging, devices, uses for big data, and remote monitoring and applying these discoveries to medicine and healthcare. The University of Illinois and the Carle Health System have the opportunity to design a new paradigm for medical education, research, and delivery of healthcare from the ground up.