The Patient-Centered Doctor’s Competency Framework in Korea

With increasing demands for medical care by society, the medical system, and general citizens and rapid changes in doctor’s awareness, the competencies required of doctors are also changing. The goal of this study was to develop a doctor’s competency framework from the patient’s perspective, and to make it the basis for the development of milestones and entrustable professional activities for each period of medical student education and resident training. To this end, a big data analysis using topic modeling was performed on domestic and international research papers (2011–2020), domestic newspaper articles (2016–2020), and domestic social networking service data (2016–2020) related to doctor’s competencies. Delphi surveys were conducted twice with 28 medical education experts. In addition, a survey was conducted on doctor’s competencies among 1,000 citizens, 407 nurses, 237 medical students, 361 majors, and 200 specialists. Through the above process, six core competencies, 16 sub-competencies, and 47 competencies were derived as subject-oriented doctor’s competencies. The core competencies were: (1) competency related to disease and health as an expert; (2) competency related to patients as a communicator; (3) competency related to colleagues as a collaborator; (4) competency related to society as a health care leader (5) competency related to oneself as a professional, and (6) competency related to academics as a scholar who contributes to the development of medicine.