Dell Medical School UT Austin (MD) Medicine Interview — Format, Questions & Prep Tips

Dell Medical School was designed to redesign healthcare. What specific change in healthcare delivery do you most want to see in your career, and why?

Be specific — reference value-based care models, fragmentation of care, social determinants, or access barriers. Connect to your experiences. Vague "improve healthcare" answers will underperform.

A low-income community is asking for a new urgent care clinic. The hospital system wants to build a specialty center instead because it is more profitable. What are the ethical issues, and what would you advocate for?

Core Dell Med theme: access vs. profitability in healthcare. Address community needs assessment, social determinants, hospital mission, advocacy channels, and the physician's role in systems change.

Role-play: You are a medical student and your patient, a 55-year-old man with Type 2 diabetes, tells you he cannot afford his insulin. How do you respond?

Show active listening, problem-solving (patient assistance programs, generic insulin alternatives, Federally Qualified Health Centers), and advocacy orientation. Dell Med trains physicians who address social determinants, not just prescriptions.

What does "value-based care" mean, and how does it differ from fee-for-service medicine?

Define both models clearly. Discuss bundled payments, ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations), outcome metrics, readmission penalties, and why value-based care is structurally difficult to implement. Show you know the mechanics, not just the concept.

What experience in your background made you want to address health equity specifically?

Dell Med's mission centers on equity. Be concrete — name the community, the disparity you witnessed, and what it made you want to do differently as a physician.

Should physicians be penalised financially if their patients do not achieve agreed health outcomes under a value-based contract?

Acknowledge the intent (accountability, patient-centered outcomes) and the problem (social determinants, patient non-adherence, attributability). A nuanced answer reflecting both system design and physician ethics will score well.

You are working in a team with a colleague who is resistant to following new evidence-based protocols. How do you engage with them?

Show interpersonal skill, intellectual humility, and collaborative problem-solving. Understand why the colleague is resistant before pushing back. Connect to patient safety outcomes.

Why Dell Medical School specifically? What about this program is different from what you could get at another Texas medical school?

Reference the Catalyze health systems project, the interprofessional model with UT Austin, Dell Seton Medical Center, the small cohort mentoring environment, and the school's explicit "redesign" mission. Be specific.

MMI station: you are shown that a hospital's value-based contract rewards lower readmission rates, and readmissions for one clinic fell — but that clinic also began seeing healthier patients on average. What does this tell you, and what would you want to verify?

Probe risk-adjustment and patient-selection (cherry-picking) before crediting the intervention. Ask for case-mix data and patient outcomes. Dell Med's value-based-care identity rewards applicants who can read a metric for unintended gaming.

MMI role-play: a standardized patient at a Travis County clinic tells you she has been rationing her blood-pressure medication to make it last because rent went up. Talk with her.

Acknowledge the impossible trade-off without judgement, problem-solve concretely (generics, 340B/FQHC access, assistance programs, social work), and treat the housing-cost driver as a legitimate clinical issue. This is Dell Med's social-determinants mission in action.

MMI station: explain to a sceptical community member why a hospital building a profitable specialty center instead of a needed primary-care clinic is a health-equity issue, without using jargon.

Make the access-vs-profit tension vivid and concrete. Connect resource allocation to who gets care and who doesn't. Tests whether you can communicate systems thinking to the public — central to Dell Med's redesign mission.

MMI reflection station: tell me about a time you tried to change a system or process and failed. What did you learn about how change actually happens?

Dell Med selects for systems-change orientation and intellectual humility. Show realistic lessons — stakeholder buy-in, incentives, persistence — rather than a clean victory. Failure handled well scores highly here.

MMI station: what is one credible criticism of the value-based care movement, and does it change your view of it?

Demonstrate you can hold the school's signature framework critically — risk of cherry-picking, administrative burden, attribution problems, equity concerns. A nuanced answer beats uncritical endorsement of the model Dell Med is built around.

MMI station: a quality-improvement dashboard your team runs reveals a colleague's patients have far worse outcomes than peers'. The colleague is well-liked and senior. What is the right thing to do with that information?

Balance patient safety, fairness to the colleague (data caveats, case-mix), and constructive non-punitive QI culture. Show you would verify before accusing and use proper channels rather than gossip or silence.

MMI role-play: a teammate on your interprofessional care team — a social worker — feels physicians on the team routinely talk over her. She raises it with you privately. How do you respond and what do you do?

Validate her concern, reflect on your own behavior honestly, and commit to concrete change (inviting her input, naming it in team huddles). Dell Med's interprofessional model makes flattened-hierarchy teamwork a tested competency.