Recovery Strategies for Digital Transformation in Small Medical Schools

Authors

  • Carlos Alberto MENDEZ Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, USA

Abstract

This narrative integrative literature review examined how small independent medical schools, such as Sunny's College of Medicine (SCM), poorly managed their post-pandemic transition from a traditional teaching curriculum into a blended (hybrid) curriculum while skipping readiness assessments, faculty engagement, and governance processes. The purpose is to analyze the governance, faculty engagement, and ethical dilemmas undermining outcomes and propose a recovery roadmap grounded in established change management and digital transformation frameworks. Using targeted search terms, keywords, and Boolean operators across Google Scholar, ProQuest, PubMed, Consensus.ai, and Perplexity.ai, the study identified thirty-six peer-reviewed sources based on relevance, recency, and applicability to higher education and health sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show that SCM rushed into hybrid adoption without readiness assessments, creating governance gaps, faculty disengagement, and student clinical readiness deficits. Accreditation warnings and donor distrust followed. Applying Saldanha's Five-Stage Model, Kotter's 8-Step Change Model, Basu & Muylle's evaluation metrics, and Hare's ethics checklist provides a framework for recovery. This study highlights an overlooked gap in digital transformation research for small, independent medical schools and contributes a replicable roadmap for stabilizing hybrid models through governance reform, faculty re-engagement, and ethics integration.

Published

2025-11-23

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2025): RAIS Journal for Social Sciences

Section

Articles
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