The Kaiser Permanente Tyson School of Medicine MD program

The curriculum rests on three pillars: biomedical science, clinical science and health systems science. The school calls its design spiral: the same core topics come back across the four years, each time in more depth, so your knowledge and clinical skills build together. Ethics is built into every course.

Threads of shared values also run across all four years. The Curriculum page names four: Advocacy and Leadership, Inclusive Practice, Health Promotion and Interprofessional Collaboration. The 2025-26 catalog lists three, without Inclusive Practice.

In Years 1 and 2 the Integrated Sciences courses carry most of the teaching. Each has three parts: Scientific Basis of Healthcare (the biomedical science), Doctoring (clinical skills) and health systems science. Patient cases that unfold over one to two weeks tie them together. Phase 1 works through organ-system units, while in Phase 2 the cases switch organ system from week to week.

In Phase 1, required in-class activities are capped at 26 hours a week, averaged over four weeks, leaving blocks of independent time to prepare cases. When the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), the school's institutional accreditor, visited in November 2024, it reported that about 70% of interactive teaching was in person, 25% live online and 5% self-paced.

In Phase 3 most learning happens on four-week rotations. You return to campus for REACH weeks and for Integrated Sciences weeks, where you analyze cases, sharpen clinical skills and cover advanced content for Step 2 CK. Year 4 ends with the Residency Immersive, two weeks of specialty-specific simulations that replicate parts of residency.

The school publishes a sample Phase 1 week, dated March 13, 2026. Mornings hold the structured teaching: Integrated Sciences small groups and labs in Scientific Basis of Healthcare on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and Doctoring on Tuesday. Thursday morning is your clinic half-day, swapped for Service-Learning once a month.

Tuesday afternoon brings health systems science and monthly Service-Learning debriefs. Monday afternoons host REACH sessions two to three times a semester and Interprofessional Collaboration four to five times a year. The rest of each afternoon is independent study, and weekend activities are generally not required in Phase 1.

For first-year students in 2026-27, classes started on July 27, assessment weeks fall in December and June, and summer break runs from June 28 to August 8, 2027. Required Phase 1 activities, including self-directed study, are capped at 68 hours a week. From Year 2, duty hours are capped at 80 a week including overnight call, and you get one day in seven free; both limits are averaged over four weeks. Overnight call in the hospital comes no more than every fourth night.

Anatomy is taught in the Anatomy Resource Center (ARC) in case-based group sessions covering surface, regional and cross-sectional anatomy, embryology, histology and diagnostic imaging. The sample timetable shows it integrated with pathology, radiology and clinical skills such as ultrasound.

The human material is already dissected. The ARC holds pre-dissected cadavers and prosections (specimens dissected in advance to show particular structures), preserved by plastination, which replaces the body's water and fat with plastic. Hand-made reproductions of bones and of disease and trauma add to the collection.

Digital tools include augmented reality, 2D and 3D digital anatomy, virtual microscopy, and ultrasound devices and simulators. Multi-user touch-screen workstations let you explore thousands of real human structures in 3D and in cross-section.

Your first clinic visit comes during the Early Immersive Experience, the course that opens Year 1. From then on you spend a half-day a week one-on-one with a family medicine or internal medicine preceptor. You care for a panel of patients with the preceptor's team of nurses, pharmacists, social workers and others, and learn to manage patients with electronic health records and data.

In Year 2 you keep the same preceptor and patients and add the other five core specialties, mostly in outpatient clinics. Five one-week Inpatient Immersion blocks take you onto hospital wards with residents and attending physicians, the senior doctors in charge.

Simulation also starts in the first weeks, in a clinical skills area modeled on the design of clinic spaces in Kaiser Permanente medical centers. Outside the curriculum, more than 250 Kaiser Permanente physicians host students for a day of shadowing at the LIC sites. Students also volunteer at a student-run clinic at the Pasadena site of JWCH, a local FQHC, with faculty physicians overseeing.

Grades are Honors, Pass, Conditional Pass or Fail. A Conditional Pass means most but not all expectations were met; after successful remediation it is recorded as CP/P. Year 1 is entirely pass/fail, and in Year 2 only the six LIC clerkships can earn Honors. For Phase 3 the sources differ. The Curriculum page says all clinical experiences are tiered, while the 2025-26 catalog shows Honors only in the Advanced Clinical and Critical Care Selectives.

Integrated Sciences courses use exams that faculty build from NBME questions, plus open-ended and essay questions. Each course ends with an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE): timed encounters with standardized patients or mannequins, some followed by a written note, an oral presentation or a discussion with an assessor.

A Progress OSCE gives your class the same graduation-level cases each year, with the passing standard rising until it matches a student ready for residency. Clinical work is also judged through preceptor ratings, direct observation, expert assessors who watch whole encounters, note reviews and feedback from other health professionals, peers and patients. An e-portfolio gathers the results for promotion reviews at the end of Years 1 and 2 and midway through Year 4.

For MD students, attending a program accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) is what makes you eligible to sit the USMLE. The LCME accredits MD programs in the United States; osteopathic (DO) students and international graduates qualify by other routes. Its directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists KPSOM as fully accredited, with 2019 as its initial year and its next survey in 2028-29. The catalog dates preliminary accreditation to February 12, 2019.

You must pass USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK to graduate, and pass Step 1 before sitting Step 2 CK. Step 1 tests the sciences basic to medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK keeps a three-digit score, with a minimum pass of 218 since July 1, 2025. You sit the NBME Comprehensive Clinical Sciences Examination (CCSE) before Step 2 CK.

The school sets deadlines rather than test dates: Step 1 by December 31 and Step 2 CK by March 31 of Year 3. In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. A June 2026 notice had named 2028. On the current schedule, a 2027 entrant's deadlines would be December 31, 2029 and March 31, 2030, so both exams would fall under the new system.

• The school encourages Step 1 before ACKT begins and Step 2 CK at the end of or soon after ACKT, if your CCSE and practice exams show readiness. Its Strategic Academic Success team may advise a later date if practice results suggest a risk of failing.
• Phase 3 Integrated Sciences weeks include case-based oral exams, such as the Intern Clinical Judgment Examination. REACH, Service-Learning and the LIC assess reflective writing.
• If you fail a licensing exam you normally retake it within 10 to 12 weeks; failing the same exam twice leads the school to strongly recommend a year-long leave of absence.

For Years 1 and 2 you are based at one of seven Kaiser Permanente medical centers, or their nearby medical offices, for the LIC. The school assigns sites to give each student the patients and experiences needed to graduate, though you can request another with good reason. Your Service-Learning health center is in the same area.

You must be able to travel by car or public transit, and in Phases 1 and 2 the school sends monthly rideshare vouchers for LIC and Service-Learning trips. There is no on-campus housing, so you find your own place.

The catalog's running text names Woodland Hills among the LIC hosts, but its address list, its course descriptions and the website give the Orange County center in Anaheim instead. Elsewhere in the catalog, Woodland Hills appears as a site for Year 3 and 4 rotations.

In Years 3 and 4 your map widens: the website says you gain access to seven more Southern California clinics and dozens nationwide. The Residency Preparedness page says most selectives and electives run at Kaiser Permanente residency and fellowship teaching sites, with affiliated electives at other local institutions.

A sub-internship is a rotation in which a senior student takes on much of an intern's work. The catalog's three Year 3 selectives are of this kind, but the school's web pages word it differently. The Curriculum page mentions sub-internships in internal medicine and a specialty of your choice; the Residency Preparedness page says at least three selectives in Year 3 and at least eight weeks of sub-internship experience.

The family medicine selective puts you on an inpatient service at a Kaiser Permanente family medicine residency, with one or two evenings of admissions a week and no overnight call. On internal medicine you join a ward team of an attending, a senior resident and interns, writing orders and daily notes. Student's-choice options run from anesthesiology and dermatology to cardiothoracic surgery, a service without residents where you work one-on-one with attending surgeons.

Across Years 3 and 4 you also take 16 weeks of clinical selectives or electives and 8 more weeks of electives or Health Systems Science selectives. The school says it offers over 140 clinical electives, usually two or four weeks long and pass/fail. They range from LGBTQ+ care and palliative care to Medicine Under Austere Conditions, which trains you as a Wilderness First Responder.

Health Systems Science selectives last four weeks. Some are classroom courses, on topics such as diagnostic error, the US health care system, patient safety or population health. Others place you with groups such as the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health or Planned Parenthood Pasadena and San Gabriel Valley, or let you design a Student Initiated Experience.

Community medicine can be combined with KPasa, a medical Spanish course for students with some Spanish, as an eight-week block: class four mornings a week and clinic five afternoons. KPasa Frontera pairs Spanish classes with Saturday volunteering at immigrant shelters in Tijuana. The global health rotation, after an application with interviews, puts you on the internal medicine or pediatric wards of Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya. It runs for four weeks in the fall of Year 4.

Away rotations at off-campus hospitals are approved by the Registrar and the Director of Clinical Affairs or arranged through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) system.

Every MD student completes a mentored Scholarly Project, except MD-PhD students, who write a dissertation instead. Preparatory work begins in Phases 1 and 2, the project runs through Phase 3, and a four-week block is reserved for it. If your project is nearly done, you can ask to be excused from two or all four weeks.

Projects can be quantitative or qualitative research, quality improvement, implementation science or social science inquiry, and many analyze data already collected for research or clinical care. You can use Kaiser Permanente's electronic health record data, join a mentor's funded study or do lab work through partnerships with local research institutions, then present at the annual Student Scholarship Symposium.

The MD-PhD is run with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), with up to three places in each class. You complete two years at KPSOM, including all core clerkships. Then comes a PhD in any Caltech research program, usually four years, and the last two years of the MD: about eight years in all. Three four-week summer lab rotations at Caltech, before Year 1 and after Years 1 and 2, help you choose a mentor.

During their Caltech PhD years, MD-PhD students keep seeing patients, about one half-day a month in Kaiser Permanente urgent care. Step 1 comes before the PhD years. Regular MD students can occasionally transfer into the program at the director's discretion.

Master's degrees need separate applications, usually in Year 2 or 3, and typically add a year after Year 3. The 2025-26 catalog and the school's FAQ list two. One is a Master of Public Health (MPH) at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; the other is a Master of Health Administration (MHA) at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. The live Curriculum page adds an MBA in Pepperdine Graziadio Business School's full-time program in Malibu.

You can also request a leave of absence for an approved research year. An extra year for research or a master's raises the maximum time to finish from six years to seven; for the MD-PhD the limit is ten.

The Medical Education Building, at Green Street and Los Robles Avenue, is an 83,000-square-foot, four-story building. Flexible classrooms seat 48 to 112 students, and twelve small-group rooms each hold 8 to 10 learners and two faculty. It also has yoga and meditation spaces, a fitness center and a teaching kitchen.

The 8,800-square-foot Simulation Center includes a 6,337-square-foot clinical skills and standardized patient area. It has ten exam rooms for standardized patients, four simulated hospital rooms with a nurses' station, debriefing rooms and a procedural skills center. Audiovisual equipment streams and records sessions for feedback and scoring.

The library's online KPSOM Clinical Library links to about 17,000 Kaiser Permanente clinical resources, more than 12,000 journals and over 9,000 online books, and the librarian supports scholarly projects.

Your REACH physician coach stays with you for four years. The WSCUC visiting team reported in 2024 that students had six to eight required coaching sessions a year, with coaches trained to International Coaching Federation principles. You also keep an individual learning plan that responds to your assessments.

During the Early Immersive Experience you meet the learning specialist who works with you for all four years and helps you prepare for board exams. Academic Support and Advising staff also help with study plans, test anxiety and Step 1 and Step 2 CK schedules, and peer tutoring is available.

You join a learning community when you start: a group of students, staff and faculty that runs social events, a peer mentoring program and friendly competitions. It also houses the Student Council, to which every student belongs.

Student Psychological Services offers short- and long-term therapy, crisis support during and after business hours, and brief Let's Talk check-ins. Every first-year student meets a psychologist once for 20 minutes.

Career advising follows the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Careers in Medicine program, with required career activities in REACH and yearly advising sessions. Specialty interest groups help you explore. You are not required to do your residency at Kaiser Permanente.