Yesterday and today, I attended the California Wellness Foundation’s annual conference on increasing the diversity of California’s health care workforce. This year’s keynote speaker, Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan, spoke about his recently published rankings of the nation’s allopathic and osteopathic medical schools. 

Check out the top and bottom twenty schools. What do you think was the metric used?

Where’s Harvard? Where are the Ivies? 

The schools were ranked based on their fulfillment of the social mission of medical education: namely, percentage of alumni going into primary care, percentage of alumni practicing in underserved areas, and percentage of students from underrepresented minority groups. 

These results aren’t very surprising, at least not to me. This is just more evidence that our tax dollars are heavily invested in furthering medical research but not in meeting the country’s needs for health care. I believe that our society should invest in primary care, medically underserved populations, and communities of color as much as we do in scientific research. If we don’t have sufficient manpower or health infrastructure to take care of everyone, no medical technology will be able to save us.

See: Full text. Appendix with full rankings.