Chris Candler

Virtual Patient Simulation at U.S. and Canadian Medical Schools

Purpose “Virtual patients” are computer-based simulations designed to complement clinical training. These applications possess numerous educational benefits but are costly to develop. Few medical schools can afford to create them. The purpose of this inventory was to gather information regarding in-house virtual patient development at U.S. and Canadian medical schools to promote the sharing of existing cases and future collaboration. Method From February to September 2005, the authors contacted 142 U.S. and Canadian medical schools and requested that they report on virtual patient simulation activities at their respective institutions. The inventory elicited information regarding the pedagogic and technical characteristics of each virtual patient application. The schools were also asked to report on their willingness to share virtual patients. Results Twenty-six out of 108 responding schools reported that they were producing virtual patients. Twelve schools provided additional data on 103 cases and 111 virtual patients. The vast majority of virtual patients were media rich and were associated with significant production costs and time. The reported virtual patient cases tended to focus on primary care disciplines and did not as a whole exhibit racial or ethnic diversity. Funding sources, production costs, and production duration influenced the extent of schools’ willingness to share. Conclusions Broader access to and cooperative development of these resources would allow medical schools to enhance their clinical curricula. Virtual patient development should include basic science objectives for more integrative learning, simulate the consequences of clinical decision making, and include additional cases in cultural competency. Together, these efforts can enhance medical education despite external constraints on clinical training.

Introducing HEAL: the Health Education Assets Library.

Digital multimedia, such as images and videos, are playing an increasingly important role in health sciences education. Educators, however, often do not have the time or resources to create high-quality materials. The authors describe the development of a new Health Education Assets Library (HEAL), a freely accessible, national library of high-quality digital multimedia to support all levels of health sciences education. HEALs primary mission is to provide educators with high-quality and free multimedia materials (such as images and videos) to augment health science education. In addition, HEAL is working with other organizations to establish a network of distributed databases of high-quality teaching resources. By using state-of-the-art Internet technologies HEAL enables educators across the country to efficiently search and retrieve teaching materials from a variety of sources.

CurrMIT: a tool for managing medical school curricula.

The AAMC Curriculum Management & Information Tool (CurrMIT) is a relational database containing curriculum information from medical schools throughout the United States and Canada. CurrMIT can be used to document details of instruction, such as outcome objectives, resources, content, educational methods, assessment methods, and educational sites, which are being employed in curricula. CurrMIT contains basic information about nearly all required courses and clerkships being offered in the United States and Canada. The database contains descriptions of more than 15,000 courses and clerkships; approximately 115,000 “sessions”—e.g., lectures, labs, small-group discussions—and more than 400,000 keywords and word strings documenting the specific details of instruction associated with the courses, clerkships, and sessions. Some specific uses that schools have made of CurrMIT include review of demographics among patient cases being used in a case-based curriculum; comparisons of educational experiences between two geographically separate clinical campuses; and identification of unplanned redundancies and gaps in curricular content. CurrMIT has been designed to accommodate data from virtually any medical school curriculum; “traditional 2+2” curricula, problem-based curricula, and systems-based curricula, and variations of each of these, have been entered in CurrMIT by medical schools. The authors give an overview of the technology upon which the system is built and the training materials and workshops that the AAMC provides to faculty to support CurrMITs use, and end by describing enhancements being planned for the system.

Database and Metadata Support of a Web-Based Multimedia Digital Library for Medical Education

Digital Libraries play an important role in education; they are beneficial to both instructors and students. Many Web file-based course material systems have been built, but most of them do not have effective management mechanisms. Instead, they often have broken links and do not support metadata. To transfer these course materials from a file repository to an integrated and searchable educational digital library, database and metadata supports are needed. In this paper, we report our design and implementation of a Web-based multimedia digital library for medical education with database and metadata support. Our system is built on top of SQL Server, a relational database management system. It adopts the Instructional Management System (IMS) standard for metadata representation and the National Library of Medicines Medical Subject Heading controlled vocabulary to remove ambiguity and inconsistency in metadata definitions. It includes a sophisticated search engine for both database content and metadata. It also supports the IMS Content Packaging Specification for learning materials export and exchange.

A digital library for health sciences educators: the Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)

Health sciences educators have the need but often have neither the time nor the resources to create and index digital multimedia materials suitable for use in educational settings. The primary mission of the Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is to provide free digital content of the highest quality that meets the needs of todays health sciences educators and learners. HEAL promotes the preservation and exchange of content while respecting ownership and privacy. The project team is working with other organizations to establish an international network of distributed databases containing high-quality teaching resources in a variety of health sciences-related subject areas. Health sciences faculty may contribute multimedia materials to the database through the Web-based contributor interface. Libraries and institutional partners may contribute collections to the database using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting or via Web services.