Electronic health records (EHRs) promise to revolutionize healthcare with electronic entry and access of health information and accompanying capabilities such as decision support and electronic interchange of information. However, to date in Canada adoption of this promising technology by healthcare professionals has remained low (with less than 20% of physicians in Canada using electronic medical records (EMRs)). Furthermore our preliminary investigations have revealed that healthcare professionals in Canada (e.g. medical and nursing students) have no or very limited exposure to this technology during their education and training and that use of EHR related technology as it has not been integrated into medical education in Canada. As a consequence it is unlikely that new graduates of our educational programs will have knowledge of and competencies with this technology upon graduation (thereby impacting adoption).

To address the above issues, the main objective of the TEKTIC project “Bringing Information Technology to Small Group Teaching in Medical Education: Knowledge Translation in Educational Practice” has been s to investigate how (EHR) Electronic Health Records and related technologies can be integrated with and influence both small and large group teaching with medical students. The principle investigators (Dr. Andre Kushniruk and Dr. Kendall Ho) have been working with colleagues (co-investigator Dr. Elizabeth Borycki as well as collaborators Dr. Ron Joe and Dr. Tony Otto) to address these issues. The team has been working on using EHR technologies to promote learning and education, thereby helping trainees to start their life long learning of eHealth (so that medical students will be as familiar with new technologies like EMRs just as they become familiar with other key technologies like the stethoscope).

To demonstrate the potential of integration of EHR into medical curricula we worked closely with the medical school faculty in Victoria, Vancouver and Prince George to integrate use of EHR into the training module of all fourth year medical students in BC (in a trial run in December 2007). An EHR designed for private medical practice was modified to be used in the initial pilot of the integration. During one week in December approximately 200 students at the three sites (Victoria, Vancouver and Prince George) were introduced to concepts related to electronic health records during lectures and were also asked to interact with the EHR directly in order to obtain emerging information about the patient case discussed that week (i.e. the case of “Tom’s backpain”) during the intensive week long problem-based learning module. Whereas previously students would have been given printed paper descriptions of patient cases, during the trial week we had the access the patient case using the modified EMR (developed by Drs. Ron Joe and Tony Otto). In addition, several classroom lectures were devoted to understanding the features of this technology (e.g. coding of data, decision support etc.).

Preliminary results indicated that students found the integration of the technology useful (although some indicated that they would have liked to have seen this even earlier in their medical training). Current research include plans for integration of EHR into the assessment of medical students’ skills in an upcoming pilot, as an extension of the project to a new TEKTIC funded project. It is hoped that our work in this area will help prompt the integration of EHR into the education of our health professional students and improve general understanding of this important new technology.