Bringing AI Literacy to Military Medicine

The Partnership for Public Service AI Center for Government™ is publishing a series of blogs to celebrate how AI and intelligent automation are being used in government to serve the public.  

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Justin Peacock, Associate Dean for Research of the School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, to learn how AI is being used to support medical school faculty across the Department of Defense. 

_{Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.} 

You created an AI curriculum for medical school faculty across the DOD. How did you get started? 

“I saw there was a need for educators to start developing AI tools they could use in the classroom to enhance their education, to accelerate the education of their learners and ultimately to personalize education for learners.  

Our medical school, which is centered in Bethesda, Md., works with military treatment facilities across the entire world. At each of these sites, we have healthcare educators [who] are clamoring for and want to learn how to use AI technologies, but just don’t know where to start. 

So [through a dean’s fellowship], I developed an entire curriculum for faculty to become literate on AI technologies—on how AI can be useful, how it can help them and how it can make them more successful as educators.”  

What does the training look like? 

“All of the courses are really very hands on. They are practical experiential learning courses. 

We started off with some fundamental classes on introduction to AI—what it is, how it’s trained, how it’s developed—to dispel some of the myths around AI technologies, which I see a lot when I talk to faculty members.  

We [then] go to an introduction to prompt engineering on how to make their prompts more effective…We [then] get into more advanced prompt engineering techniques and we talk about things like retrieval augmented generation, where we’re inputting images or PDFs, or, in more advanced cases, databases from which these tools can then pull to get very highly accurate, highly precise information. 

We also talk about developing custom tools within these AI technologies [and] how to develop images and videos [and] then we have them actually do it. We have them work it out and we [assign] tasks that would be similar to what they would do as an educator: developing a medical curriculum; developing a study guide; developing questions for learners in their specialty; developing simulation scenarios; and creating patient education materials.” 

What has worked well with the curriculum? 

“I found that to be extremely successful with adult learners, and especially well-educated adult learners, it needs to be an experiential process. They need to experiment, they need to try it out, they need to practice it, they need to see what the pros and cons [of AI tools] are. They need to fail at it and be okay with failing at it and learn from it.” 

What is unique about teaching AI in a medical context? 

“We talk about principles related to medical ethics [and] how we adjust or adapt how we work with these tools so we can address some of those ethical challenges. Then we have them actually grapple with real life scenarios in the clinical context; we want our learners to know how to use [AI] safely and accurately and appropriately.” 

Do you have a few examples?  

“We developed a tool that creates a virtual patient that [learners] interact with that simulates really a live patient. The tool is so effective it can actually analyze and evaluate the learner [based] on a rubric we’ve given it…And then the nice thing about it is, unlike a real healthcare educator, it has unlimited time, so now it can answer any questions learners have, address any concerns they have. It supports deeper learning. 

We see the medical faculty we’ve trained using AI to: 

• Organize lecture schedules and complex administrative tasks 
• Create educational materials 
• Provide feedback to their students 
• Collate observations from preceptors and tie feedback to proficiency milestones 

The program is really about helping these healthcare educators become literate on AI technologies, and how [these AI technologies] can be useful, how they can help them, how they can make them more successful as educators. We can make [AI use in medical education and clinical contexts] ethical, we can make it useful, we can make it accurate and we can make it appropriate.” 

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Continuing the conversation  

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