Joseph Donald Boudreau, former Associate Dean of Medical Education and Student Affairs at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine, participated in the Future of Medicine Forum. Below is the content of the interview conducted during the event.

My name is Donald. I'm a professor at McGill University in Montreal. I was formerly the Associate Dean of undergraduate medical education. I am a recently retired lung specialist. I’ve had a relationship with Tsinghua Medicine for about 2 years. I helped them to design their new organ-based system teaching program.

Question1 What are the unique strengths of Tsinghua’s medical education compared to other institutions?

Tsinghua is uniquely positioned to do something that's probably very important in the world and probably unparalleled. Tsinghua has a fantastic reputation, world-renowned for technology, biomedical engineering, for artificial intelligence, and all these emerging technologies are probably going to be put into the service of medical education.

So Tsinghua is positioned to make that kind of contribution. I'm quite excited about that because I think the combination of Tsinghua's strengths in technology and its intended goals of promoting patient centeredness. That mixture of both is something that probably nowhere else in the world, can you see that kind of potential.

Question2 In addressing global health challenges, how do you think Tsinghua can leverage its academic and research strengths?

I will continue investing in the technology. These days, particularly in artificial Intelligence. Critically, we need to sort of see where they can make good contributions, and we should be able to separate out the intentional, and identify what may be the unintentional consequences of these technologies. We want them to be in the service of patients, and find a way where these technologies will not interfere with humanistic sensitivities, which is one of the core missions of Tsinghua Medicine. So I think that's something that Tsinghua can do that many of the schools in the world cannot do.

Question3 To improve healthcare quality globally, which educational models do you think are most effective in training high-quality medical teams?

I think one of the models is probably very important, and it's interesting because it is a very old model. It's the apprenticeship model, the term in Latin is loco parentis, the place of family. So in a way, medical education plays a local parental role, it plays a role like a family does to help a family member. Parents will help the students grow and develop in a certain way. A medical education medical program has a similar obligation to help the students develop in a certain way that puts technology in the service of patient care. Currently, we tend to refer to it more as mentorships, but the idea that you link a senior physician with a junior physician and that the senior physician has a role to play, making the junior physician feel as if they joined a family of committed and dedicated doctors, but mentorships are ideally suited for that kind of program.

Question4 Do you have any plans for future collaborations with Tsinghua?

My relationship with Tsinghua is quite new. There's only been about 2 years, but again I’m very excited about it. I think that this university holds a huge promise, but what I foresee in the future is partnerships where we can identify similar questions together and see how our different communities can answer the questions together. I think it's a brand new, flourishing program, and there's lots of potential.