JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are used widely for state of the art co-working on patient cases within multidisciplinary hospital teams. Therefore, medical students need to be trained for using health information technologies within this environment from the early stages of their education on.

Objective:

As little is known about the effects of specific training within the medical curriculum, we aimed to develop a course module and provide evaluation for it in order to offer best practice teaching to today’s students. Moreover, we looked at the acceptance of new technologies such as EHR.

Methods:

N = 104 5th year medical students of the University of Tuebingen took part in a standardized training procedure about the possibilities and pitfalls of EHR and performed their own EHR entries on standardized patient cases in a safe practice environment thereafter. Additionally, questionnaires – standardized and open questions – were administered to assess students’ experiences with the new teaching module, the newly developed EHR simulator, the acceptance of the health technology as well as their attitudes towards it before and after training.

Results:

Students rated the benefit of EHR training for their medical knowledge significantly higher after the teaching session than before but had also more doubts about the long-term benefit of EHR for multidisciplinary co-working after training. The special training with a simulation software was rated helpful to prepare students but they still didn’t feel safe in all aspects of EHR.

Conclusions:

We assume that by specifically training students for the usage of EHR, besides gaining more and helpful knowledge, students become more aware of the risks and challenges in patient-doctor and doctor-team communication thus showing more critical thinking after training. Overall, students welcomed the new training module and supported the integration into the medical curriculum. Further studies are needed to optimize training modules that can be used in a safe environment by the students who seem to show high acceptance and openness towards new health technologies.