Students get trained in e-medicine

Doctors may think using electronic health records means they're not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas would be a good place to go to learn about this new technology.

Starting with its 2005-2006 incoming class, the University of Kansas School of Medicine has integrated an EHR system into its medical curriculum, says Timothy McNamara, Medical Director of the Center for Healthcare Informatics at UK's School of Medicine.

"We're trying to create an integrated curriculae that brings basic science and clinical practice together," says McNamara.

Kansas' experiment has inspired interest from other medical schools. Baylor University's College of Medicine is also putting in place the training curricula needed to start its 2006-2007 class of medical students out on EHRs, says Lynn Yeoman, senior director of academic Computing at Baylor in Houston, Texas. The University of Wisconsin is also looking to begin deploying systems.

Teaching doctors how to use electronic health records presents a challenge for any medical school. The first two years of medical school are usually devoted to non-clinical activities, like learning anatomy. Electronic health records don't make a neat fit. McNamara says that's a big reason why medical schools generally are behind nursing schools in teaching EHR skills.

Indeed, the Kansas School of Medicine is following the lead of its School of Nursing, which started integrating EHRs into the curriculum process in 2001. Bringing an electronic component into all its classes required the retraining of faculty that in some cases were not computerized and had never seen a health record in a classroom context.

McNamara, who is also chief medical officer at HealthGate Data Group, which provides evidence-based medicine systems, says that training medical students on how to use EHRs isn't just a vocational training exercise. "It's the discipline of using all the resources available to them to make better decisions" while caring for patients, he says.