Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Oct 30, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 3, 2018 - Dec 29, 2018
Date Accepted: Aug 19, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Navigating Through Electronic Health Records: Survey Study on Medical Students’ Perspectives in General and With Regard to a Specific Training
Background:
An electronic health record (EHR) is the state-of-the-art method for ensuring all data concerning a given patient are up to date for use by multidisciplinary hospital teams. Therefore, medical students need to be trained to use health information technologies within this environment from the early stages of their education.
Objective:
As little is known about the effects of specific training within the medical curriculum, this study aimed to develop a course module and evaluate it to offer best practice teaching for today’s students. Moreover, we looked at the acceptance of new technologies such as EHRs.
Methods:
Fifth-year medical students (N=104) at the University of Tübingen took part in a standardized two-day training procedure about the advantages and risks of EHR use. After the training, students performed their own EHR entries on hypothetical patient cases in a safe practice environment. In addition, questionnaires—standardized and with open-ended questions—were administered to assess students’ experiences with a new teaching module, a newly developed EHR simulator, the acceptance of the health technology, and their attitudes toward it before and after training.
Results:
After the teaching, students rated the benefit of EHR training for medical knowledge significantly higher than before the session (mean 3.74, SD 1.05). However, they also had doubts about the long-term benefit of EHRs for multidisciplinary coworking after training (mean 1.96, SD 0.65). The special training with simulation software was rated as helpful for preparing students (88/102, 86.2%), but they still did not feel safe in all aspects of EHR.
Conclusions:
A specific simulated training on using EHRs helped students improve their knowledge and become more aware of the risks and challenges of such a system. Overall, students welcomed the new training module and supported the integration of EHR teaching into the medical curriculum. Further studies are needed to optimize training modules and make use of long-term feedback opportunities a simulated system offers.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.