Preparing Physicians for Tomorrow’s Practice: Contemporary Practice Competencies as a Framework for Technology-Driven Change (Preprint)

Medical education has long relied on stable, high-level program objectives to articulate the outcomes of undergraduate medical training. These objectives have served an essential role in defining professional identity, guiding curricular design, and ensuring accountability. However, the pace of contemporary clinical change increasingly exceeds the capacity of static curricular structures to adapt. Expectations for how physicians practice, communicate, and exercise judgment, particularly in technology-mediated care environments, are evolving faster than traditional curricular governance mechanisms can accommodate. Recent accreditation developments, including proposed changes to the organization of required content domains, signal a broader inflection point: medical schools are being challenged to move beyond additive, topic-based approaches to curriculum design toward more durable and adaptive frameworks for preparing physicians for practice. This Viewpoint argues that many of the tensions currently facing medical education reflect an overreliance on problem lists and topical coverage models that were designed for a slower era of clinical evolution. As new priorities emerge, ranging from artificial intelligence and data-driven decision support to prevention, climate health, and changing patient expectations, curricula risk becoming increasingly dense, fragmented, and difficult to govern. Simply elevating each new priority to the level of a program objective undermines the coherence and longevity of objective frameworks and politicizes curricular decision-making. To address this challenge, we propose Contemporary Practice Competencies (CPCs) as a complementary, middle-layer construct positioned between Medical Educational Program Objectives and course- or clerkship-level objectives. CPCs are dynamic, revisable competencies designed to translate stable educational aims into forward-facing clinical capabilities, particularly in domains where technology and data-driven tools are reshaping clinical reasoning. Using artificial intelligence as a primary test case, we illustrate how CPCs enable longitudinal, assessable development of emerging practice capabilities without repeatedly restructuring high-level objectives. By providing a transparent and adaptable mechanism for curricular evolution, CPCs offer a practical approach to aligning medical education with the accelerating realities of contemporary clinical practice.