Education and informatics: it's time to join forces

Application of information and communication technologies in medical education

The recognition that information and communication technologies should play an increasingly important role in medical education is a key to educating physicians in the 21(st) century. Computer use in medical education includes, Internet hypermedia/multimedia technologies, medical informatics, distance learning and telemedicine. Adaptation to the use of these technologies should ideally start from the elementary school level. Medical schools must introduce medical informatics courses very early in the medical curriculum. Teachers will need regular CME courses to prepare and update themselves with the changing circumstances. Our infrastructure must be prepared for the new developments with computer labs, basic skill labs, close circuit television facilities, virtual class rooms, smart class rooms, simulated teaching facilities, and distance teaching by tele-techniques. Our existing manpower including, doctors, nurses, technicians, librarians, and administration personal require hands-on training, while new recruitment will have to emphasize compulsory knowledge of and familiarity with information technology. This paper highlights these subjects in detail as a means to prepare us to meet the challenges of the 21(st) century.

"Docs 'n drugs--the virtual polyclinic": an intelligent tutoring system for web-based and case-oriented training in medicine

Since the beginning of the year 2000 medical students of the University of Ulm are working in their curriculum with the web-based and case-oriented tutoring system "Docs 'n Drugs - The Virtual Polyclinic". The system consists of different subsystems and services. One subsystem is the Training System. It is based on three models: the Tutoring Process Model, the Case Knowledge Model and the Medical Knowledge Model. They describe the tutoring process as a series of nodes and steps, depict the structure of the medical cases, and provide the medical knowledge respectively. Case knowledge and medical knowledge form the expert knowledge of the medical domain. Together with the tutoring process, they build the basis for automatic intelligent tutoring. After giving a deeper insight into the system architecture and the training case structure, an informal evaluation shows a first feedback of the learners.

Instructional technology in medical education: lessons learnt

New instructional technologies, especially Web-based applications, may play an increasing role in medical education, particularly for distance and distributed learning. As medical educators turn to this medium, numerous benefits and opportunities, but also challenges and pitfalls, will arise. The successful development and implementation of instructional technologies in medicine require an appreciation of the medium's heterogeneous nature, its strengths, weaknesses and limitations. These in turn rely on partnerships with various experts and the early adoption of evaluation. We have summarized the lessons learnt from developing Web-based courses on palliative care in a framework for adopting instructional technologies. This framework incorporates development, implementation and evaluation.