PRESS RELEASE:
LEWISBURG, W.Va. – Imagine entering a pod-like device — think a more advanced version of the blood pressure kiosks common at pharmacies— and coming out with an artificial intelligence-powered health report and treatment plan. The chair of the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine (WVSOM) AI Task Force thinks a world with this and other artificial intelligence-assisted health technologies could soon be a reality.
“I see that being not too far off,” said Machelle Linsenmeyer, Ed.D., WVSOM’s assistant vice president of institutional effectiveness and academic resources, who also participates in the AI Advisory Workgroup with the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM).
“On AACOM’s task force, we recently talked about the impact a device like this could make in rural settings where it’s hard for patients to access providers to get individualized plans,” Linsenmeyer said.
WVSOM’s own task force incorporates feedback from campus constituent groups ranging from faculty and students to departments in charge of academic technology, library resources, admissions, marketing, business, information technology and other school operations. The goal is to work toward finding ways to use AI tools to assist in medical education and increase work efficiency.
Some WVSOM faculty members employ AI to create exam questions from course materials, and academic staff have developed “agents” — programmable systems that use AI to pursue specific goals — to help students create study notes and practice communication skills, among other uses.
Linsenmeyer said the creation of the school’s task force was driven by the fact that medical students everywhere were early adopters of AI-based learning tools.
“Students were already creating AI agents and developing prompts to make studying more efficient,” she said. “We had students who knew tools faculty didn’t know, and we didn’t have policies about what students could or couldn’t do with AI. The technology is moving so fast that we felt we needed to pull together information to prepare faculty for integrating this into their teaching, and to bring together stakeholders across WVSOM to talk about our AI priorities.”
Barry Ndeh, Class of 2027, is the student representative on WVSOM’s task force. He was first exposed to AI toward the end of undergraduate school and began using it during his first year of medical school to create lecture outlines, practice questions and flashcards.
“So much of my study time was spent simply trying to create study materials that I didn’t have time to actually study. When I started using AI to make the materials, I was able to cut maybe five hours a day from my study time, and my grades shot up,” he said.
In April, Linsenmeyer and Ndeh offered training as part of a pre-conference AI workshop in Arlington, Texas, at AACOM’s annual Educating Leaders conference. The audience largely consisted of deans and professors from U.S. osteopathic medical schools.
“It blew them away,” Ndeh said. “There’s an application that lets me plug in a topic and AI will teach me based on my favorite show — for example, ectopic pregnancy using a made-up scene from Family Guy. I showed them and they said, ‘Wow. This is insane.’”
Linsenmeyer noted that WVSOM’s faculty also is learning to use artificial intelligence to evaluate students’ SOAP notes — the health care industry’s standardized “Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan” system for documenting patient encounters — and for assessing scholarly activity such as literature reviews.
She said the school is looking into automating curriculum mapping — a process that shows how a curriculum aligns with intended learning outcomes — and is using AI-enhanced simulation cases in WVSOM’s Clinical Evaluation Center, where students hone their medical expertise through interactive models such as manikins, simulated patients and virtual reality.
Other resources being considered by WVSOM’s administration are a Student Government Association-approved artificial intelligence club and an elective course devoted to AI.
The use of artificial intelligence even extends to recruitment and admissions — not just at WVSOM, but at medical schools throughout the world. In the 2024-25 academic year, WVSOM’s Office of Admissions participated in an AACOM pilot program that taught staff how to use AI to predict which applicants are likely to matriculate at a given school.
Ronnie Collins, WVSOM’s executive director of enrollment management, said the agent will be implemented as a part of the screening process for students applying for the 2026-27 academic year. Staff provided four years of enrollment data to teach the AI agent to look for factors common in applicants who choose WVSOM, such as a student’s undergraduate institution, geographical distance from Lewisburg, rural interest and amount of health care experience.
“It will help us identify candidates who have different metric combinations we might not have been able to identify manually,” Collins said. “It pulls applicants to the top of the list if they meet the profile of our students based on historical data.”
Artificial intelligence processes won’t play a part in making final decisions about whether a student is invited to attend WVSOM. There are human factors machines can’t measure, Collins explained.
“The system doesn’t take into account things applicants do outside it. If a student comes for a campus tour or an open house or second-look day — or if an alumni writes them a letter of recommendation — AI won’t know that,” he said.
James W. Nemitz, Ph.D., WVSOM’s president, said AI provides efficiencies that make it useful to many members of the campus community, and that without a task force to guide its use in medical education and workflows, the school would risk being outpaced.
“We have recognized that artificial intelligence provides a competitive edge whether you’re a student, faculty member, staff or administrator,” Nemitz said. “It’s here to stay, and we have a choice to either incorporate it into our work or be left behind.”
