The game changer.

wants to make the transition between medical school and residency seamless. A lthough she no longer heads a medical school, Deborah Powell is making a mark on medical education. She's trying to break down the wall between medical school and residency and wants to see students trained in a way that's practical , efficient and better reflects the way medicine is practiced today. " Medicine has evolved so far that the idea that was prevalent 30 to 40 years ago of training a generalist physician who could go down any pathway is probably not so reasonable anymore, " says the former University of Minnesota Medical School dean. Specifically, she would like to see the curriculum redesigned in a way that starts moving students into their chosen specialty earlier. " The idea is to be more purposeful in putting undergraduate and graduate medical education together in a single pathway and to advance students based on their achievement of competen-cies, rather than time in training, " she explains. Powell, who is known for being an innovator (she created the Flex MD program at the University of Minnesota while she was dean and won the Association of American Medical Colleges' 2013 Abra-ham Flexner Distinguished Service to Medical Education award) and a champion for competency-based education, started sharing her idea more than a decade ago. " I talked about it nationally in speeches at meetings and with friends from the education community, " she says. " Everyone said it was a great idea, but it couldn't be done. " Nevertheless, she persisted, tapping her connections at medical schools and in organizations such as the AAMC, the Ac-creditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the American Board of Pediatrics. Powell eventually won support for a pilot of a new model for training medical students wanting to go into pediatrics. The model will be tested in four U.S. medical schools, including the University of Min-nesota's, over the next four years. Called Education for Pediatrics Across the Continuum (EPAC), it allows students who have finished their first two years of medical school to progress through a specially designed curriculum, most of which will be focused on pediatrics. For example, they'll do their emergency medicine, surgery and psychiatry rotations in a chil-dren's hospital. They also will work with a preceptor in a pediatrics clinic and build a panel of patients, whom they will care for over the course …