Prof Wong is an ophthalmologist and physician-scientist-leader who completed medical school at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, USA. In 2022, he took up a new position as Chair Professor and Founding Head of Tsinghua Medicine at Tsinghua University, China. Over the past two decades, Prof Wong has served in multiple leadership positions in Singapore and Australia, with his last position (2014-2021) as Deputy Group CEO (Research and Education), SingHealth and Vice-Dean, Duke-NUS as well as Arthur Lim Professor and Medical Director of the Singapore National Eye Center.
Prof Wong is a retinal specialist, with a research portfolio on retinal diseases and ocular imaging, including AI. He has published >1,400 peer-reviewed papers (h-index 184), given >500 invited named, plenary, and symposium lectures globally, and received >US$100 million in grant funding. Prof Wong has been recognized with multiple international awards, including Arnall Patz Medal (Macula Society), the Alcon Research Institute Award, the Jose Rizal Medal (Asia Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology). He has received Singapore’s President’s Science and Technology Award. He is an elected international (foreign) member of the US National Academy of Medicine.
In the past 10 years, Prof Wong has focused his efforts on building up academic medicine at the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Center, and has developed multiple programs to support medical education, translational research, physician-scientist development and adoption of digital technology and healthcare innovation.
Session:
Medical Education for the Future 8 October 2022, 0915 - 1000hrs
Medical education has undergone a century of transformation, starting with influential Flexner report in 1910 which transformed the nature and process of medical education in the US with the establishment of the biomedical model as the standard of medical training. Subsequent reforms have included organ system based model, problem-based learning (PBL) and competency based medical education (CBME), among others. The most important questions are: what are the healthcare challenges of tomorrow? What does the future doctor need to prepare for these challenges? What then should the future medical education curriculum focus on? Besides the traditional system disease-treatment and individual patient-doctor models, medical education the future should include elements of digital medicine (covering data science, AI, mobile health and telemedicine) and bioengineering (covering biomaterials, robotics, wearables). Additionally, in the face of COVID-19 and other pandemics, future medical education need a re-emphasis of the importance of public health (covering foundations of infectious disease, epidemiology, preventive medicine and implementation science). With the growth of “fake medical news”, medical students need to understand concepts of evidence-based medicine. Finally, medical education must emphasize the humanistic aspect of medicine (empathy, society versus individual).
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