JustInTime: Technology to deliver curriculum & manage educational requirements with mobile technology

Gary Ferenchick
Michigan State University

Theresa Bernardo
College of Veterinary Medicine, Michigan State University

*Moses Fetters
College of Veterinary Medicine, Michigan State University

Topic: Web-based medical education
Track: Practice
Type: Oral presentation

     Full text: Not available
     Slides: available to participants
     Last modified: March 15, 2006
     Presentation date: 10/18/2006 9:00 AM in RYH Confederation 5
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
Several trends are converging in health professions education, which aim to translate new information and new technologies into safe and effective patient-centered care. Included among these trends are the exponential growth of an information technology (IT) infrastructure and the increasing demand for competency-based education. Given this, technologies that can adapt to changing environmental conditions and successfully deliver curricular objectives, and monitor and record a student's experiences have become key educational needs. The Clerkship Directors of Internal Medicine (CDIM) curriculum is a nationally accepted curriculum that defines the expected learning outcomes for 3rd year medical students on internal medicine. The CDIM curriculum is well accepted by educators, however it requires 61 pages of type written content to cover the requisite objectives. Given this volume of information, knowing "what a student should be able to do" at the point of the patient encounter is difficult. Therefore assessment for attainment of these specific learning objectives is difficult if not impossible and the evaluation burden for medical educators who are forced to rely on paper-based record systems for recording student encounters becomes progressively more likely to be educationally incomplete and logistically unmanageable. The increasing adoption of electronic systems coupled with the wider use of mobile technology (eg PDA s) has the potential to be significant change agents in advancing the cause of improved efficiency, and accountability in health professions education. Given this, we developed a platform technology, JustInTime (JIT), which can be used to support mobile computing in any setting. JIT is a web-based tool that allows easy authoring and downloading of content to a mobile device, and for content to be uploaded back to a central database. As a first application, we used JIT to adapt the Clerkship Directors of Internal Medicine (CDIM) curriculum by integrating a tool that allows students to quickly access the CDIM competencies and to track, document and store a record of their patient interactions. Content that is currently managed by the authoring tool includes - text, images, sound files, calculators and test items. 9 months of pilot test data at Michigan State University has demonstrated our ability to deliver this program successfully to all 3rd year students at our geographically dispersed medical school, with minimal technological problems. Summary data to date includes: the number of patient problems logged by all students was 9579; since September of 2005, the aggregate number of "hits" within the JIT program was 10,000, for an average of 143 per student (average 2.6 times per day conservatively). Anonymous survey data from students who've used JIT (58% of the total) revealed that 42% of students did not have a PDA prior to the IM clerkship; in spite of this, 77% found the program easy to navigate; 51% rated JIT-IM similar or better than other software packages; 91% used it occasionally (72%) or frequently (19%). We believe that mobile technology such as JIT can be a valuable tool as LCME accreditation standards evolve to require more assessment and documentation of trainee competencies and experiences.