Advancements in economics, communications and transportation have facilitated the rapid shrinking of the "global village," Schwarz, who is also the former president of the China Medical Board of New York, said.
The impacts of globalization have extended to global medicine, Schwarz said.
The increased movement of patients, physicians and animals has changed the way physicians approach patient care. It is now common for Americans to travel to India for gallbladder surgery, where the procedure is one-fifth as expensive as in the United States, he said.
"People and animals are moving, and disease is moving with them," Schwarz said. "We can no longer say, We don't see malaria, so we don't need to be able to treat it,' because you may see malaria in your very own emergency room."
Schwarz said the Institute for International Medical Education in its efforts to define the "Global Essential Minimum Requirements" for medical professionals first identified seven distinct areas in which all medical professionals should be competent. It then formulated an objective way to evaluate these competencies, including multiple-choice questions and structured clinical evaluations.
The institute used this procedure to evaluate Chinese medical students and report on the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese medical schools.
The institute later decided to complete a five-year follow-up on the results of the evaluations, Schwarz said.
"We had unleashed a wave of reform of medical education in China, with all changes aimed at eliminating the weaknesses in our evaluative report cards," Schwarz said.
The development of a global medical profession is a realistic goal, Schwarz said.
To develop such a system, professionals around the world must be educated about the necessity of a global profession, he added.
A global organization analogous to the American Medical Association would then be necessary to develop and manage such a system, Schwarz said.
