Taiwan-based National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) recently held the opening ceremony for the Post-baccalaureate Programme in Medicine, during which NTHU president Hocheng Hong said that the new programme will train students to meet the challenges of tomorrow by focusing on the ABCs of the medical science of the future, viz., Artificial intelligence (AI), Big data, and the Cloud-based internet of things.

The Post-baccalaureate Programme in Medicine belongs to the College of Life Science, the dean of which is Kao Ruey-ho. Dean Kao said that the first batch of students will include twenty-three publicly-funded students, sixteen of which will be based in the Natural Science Group, and seven in the Information Technology Group.

Dean Kao also mentioned that the Programme has already appointed over 100 full-time and joint-appointment faculty members, and that all the required facilities will soon be ready for use, including a dissection room with nine dissection tables.

The Programme’s curriculum conforms to international standards. Dean Kao observed that departments of medicine in Taiwan traditionally divide the curriculum into independent subjects, such as physiology, pharmacology, pathology, cardiology, nephrology, and urology. By contrast, NTHU’s Programme takes more of a systems approach, in which basic and clinical courses are combined, as in the course on the cardiovascular system which integrates such related areas as pharmacology.