Speaking from the Canadian experience, there are some very sinister implications:
1) AP residency is 5 years in Canada and you write your exam in your 5th year. They just switched to a competency based model, and you can write your exam in 4th year. Yet residency length is not shortened, aka in your 5th year you are certified, yet have to work 1 year under resident salary. Guess what this means? you'll be signing out cases and frozens and taking all the risk doing so on a resident salary. Another point, under this model if you don't achieve your competency, your residency can be (?indefinitely) prolonged until you achieve competency. So basically there is no upward limit on how long a program can keep you there?
2) The article mentions the new model at Penn State will shorten training by 1 year and "Dr. Newell adds, “They’re going to get to their attending salary one year sooner than they would have, and that is not insignificant.”. I doubt this will be the case. I forsee that there will be increasing pressure to do an additional year of fellowship, so that extra year is again contributing to the workload as fellow (can sign out cases and get paid very little) rather than resident.
3) This Dr. Abendroth also claims "It’s definitely going to increase across-the-board awareness of what pathology is and how it contributes to patient care.” I disagree with this notion. Increasing awareness is achieved by more interaction with colleagues in other fields, so in that sense more clinical rotations in other fields are helpful. It's already unfortunate that US residency does not include a clinical year, and in Canada the clinical year is severely reduced in the new model, with more focus on pathology field itself. This is bad, as the esoteric nature of pathology already causes issue with isolation. If anything, I would advocate some clinical rotations in higher years (eg. a month of med onc clinic in PGY3 would significantly help the resident understanding how tumor staging affects treatment decisions, whereas PGY1's understanding of tumor staging is rather vague).
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