Analytics team members (l-r) David Lewis, Aneet Bhattal, and George Etelvari.
What happens when software developers, business analysts, and clerkship educators work together? The answer: our students benefit.
As new iterations of Learn.med roll out this spring and become adopted more widely, it is our third-year clerkship students who ultimately will benefit. During clerkships, medical students rotate through various hospital departments and units where they are expected to observe certain clinical conditions — called required clinical encounters (RCE). They report their progress via Learn.med, our home-grown online portal that manages curriculum, content, and learning.
The analytics team recently collaborated with the development team to produce entrustable professional activities (EPA) analytics on user’s Learn.med dashboard. In March, the team will release similar EPA analytics tailored for students and their Foundations of Clinical Medicine coaches, who serve as mentors during the clerkship year. We anticipate more positive responses from these new Learn.med features.
Always looking to expand the functionality of Learn.med, the developers and analysts used open-source technology to create a new feature that enables educators to monitor a student’s RCE progress and quickly identify when help is needed.
Aside from the end-product itself — which is great — I love how it came together: software developers partnering with the business analytics team to assist clerkship educators to further our medical education mission in training the physicians of tomorrow.
Here’s What Collaborators and Early Users Are Saying:
David Lewis, analytics team for undergraduate medical education:
“The collaboration and communication from Michael Szul and his development team has worked well. The new functionality for clerkship coordinators, clerkship directors, and master assessors is more convenient and actionable than past iterations. In all aspects of this project, the support from the Learn.med development team was essential to its successful deployment.”
Kyle Williams, Clerkship and Medical Education Coordinator:
“The RCE changes on Learn.med has helped with monitoring student progress throughout the rotation, especially with pulling information for mid-clerkship feedback. We are now able to view a snapshot of completed RCEs without opening individual student subfolders. This frees up time for us to assist our directors in revamping curriculum for the upcoming changes.”
Heather Trainum, Clerkship Program Coordinator, Department of Surgery:
“This is an extremely helpful update and now allows coordinators to easily access, view, and monitor students at any time, even when a computer is not immediately available.”
Thank you to the business analytics and development teams, who partnered in developing these new easy-to-use functions for our clerkship coordinators. I look forward to the continued evolution of Learn.med.
R.J. Canterbury, MD, MS, DLFAPA
Wilford W. Spradlin Professor
Senior Associate Dean for Education