Rise Up – To Our Associations, Colleges, and Universities: Be the Bridge

Part 3 of the Rise Up Series: Practical Paths to Healthcare Transformation

By Darren Larsen, MD | DarrenLarsen.com

Medical associations, regulatory colleges, and universities occupy a unique position in Canadian healthcare. You’re trusted by clinicians in ways that governments and vendors are not. You shape training, standards, and professional identity. You have convening power that others lack.

With that position comes responsibility. In a time of rapid technological and systemic change, our professional organizations must be bridges, connecting clinicians to innovation, translating between stakeholders, and leading with both wisdom and urgency.

Medical Associations: Advocate for Better Work, Not Just Compensation

Medical associations do vital work negotiating compensation and protecting physician interests. But the crisis facing clinicians today isn’t primarily about money. It’s about time, cognitive load, and professional fulfillment.

Expand advocacy to include workflow. Push for interoperability requirements. Demand that technology procurement include clinician input. Negotiate for implementation support, not just software access. When your members tell you the EMR is making them miserable, that’s not a technology problem, it’s a professional practice issue that deserves Association attention.

Partner with organizations that understand physician workflow and can translate clinical needs into practical solutions. Don’t try to build technology yourselves, be the voice that ensures technology serves your members.

Be the voice that ensures technology

Colleges: Evolve Standards for a Digital Era

Regulatory colleges set standards of practice. Those standards must evolve to reflect how care is actually delivered today,and how it will be delivered tomorrow.

Develop clear guidance on AI-assisted documentation. Define expectations for digital communication with patients. Make these permissive rather than restrictive.  Create frameworks for evaluating new technologies that balance innovation with safety. Don’t let fear of the new paralyze standard-setting.  Clinicians need clarity, and ambiguity creates anxiety.

Equally important: remove barriers that don’t serve patients. Examine regulations through the lens of workflow and the actual experience of an individual trying his hardest to get care. If a requirement adds administrative burden without improving care or safety, question whether it belongs.

Universities: Train for the System That’s Coming

Medical education still largely trains physicians for a healthcare system that no longer exists and certainly won’t exist when today’s students are mid-career.

Integrate digital fluency throughout curricula, not as an elective but as a core competency. Teach students how to evaluate health technologies critically. Show them what effective human-technology partnership looks like in clinical practice. Don’t let them graduate thinking that staring at a screen for ninety percent of a patient encounter is normal.

Partner with health systems and technology organizations to expose learners to innovation. Create pathways for clinicians interested in informatics, implementation science, and health system transformation. The physicians who will lead healthcare’s future need skills we’re not yet consistently teaching.

All Three: Convene and Connect

Perhaps your greatest power is convening. Bring clinicians, technologists, policymakers, and patients into the same room. Create spaces for honest conversation about what’s working and what isn’t. Facilitate the relationships that make transformation possible.

Host conferences that showcase practical innovation, not just academic theory. Create forums where frontline clinicians can share workflow solutions with peers. Build networks that spread good ideas quickly across the country.

You are trusted. Use that trust to bridge divides that others cannot.  Help government govern and be better.

Help government govern and be better.

The Moment Is Now

Healthcare transformation will happen with or without our professional organizations at the table. Technology will advance. Policy will change. The question is whether associations, colleges, and universities will lead that change or react to it.

Be the bridge. Connect your members to the future. Translate between clinical reality and technological possibility. Set standards that enable rather than obstruct. Train physicians for the system that’s coming.

Your members are counting on you. So are their patients.

Tomorrow, Part 4 in the series:  Fellow Clinicians: We Can’t Wait for Permission