Hi,
I’m involved in a group that is looking at the development of ePortfolios for students’ clinical attachments.
One of the issues we are addressing is the cost of providing clinical assessment and feedback in the ePortfolio. Students complain that they labourously document their activities and observations on an attachment, but get very little feedback on whether the amount, quality and variety of their experience is suburb/good/bad/unacceptable for the particular attachment. However giving the student this feedback requires a senior clinician to read the ePortfolio and comment - and this is too time consuming to happen in practice.
Question: Could openEHR allow students to document their clinical experience in a machine-process able form?
They could then get immediate feedback on how they compare to other students on the same attachment, and how the attachment compares to similar attachments done by other firms.
If the answer to the question is yes, any ideas on how to make this happen?
Thx,
Derek
Hi Derek,
Interesting idea but I am not sure that openEHR would have much to offer here, over a conventional RDBMS. I appreciate the problem but having been involved in both under and post-grad ‘practical’ medical training, I am not convinced that it will realistically ever be possible to ‘machine-process’ student comments to provide useful feedback. It is, of course, easy enough to set a few targets and objectives. but like any target-based assessment, it may completely miss very valuable gained experience, and conversely, just because the requisite targets have been met does not mean that a satisfactory learning experience has been gained.
It would certainly be possible to construct archetypes to capture training goals etc but the deeper question is what should these goals be, and is this any better than the current arrangement. Have you considered getting students to share their e-Portfolios on-line?
If no-one reads the e-Portfolio, what is its purpose? .
Regards,
Ian
Dr Ian McNicoll
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Clinical Analyst Ocean Informatics
Honorary Senior Research Associate, CHIME, University College London
openEHR Archetype Editorial Group
Member BCS Primary Health Care SG Group www.phcsg.org / BCS Health Scotland
Hi Ian,
It’s not a dumb question - however it’s really a problem of the difference between theory and practice!
It’s not realy the subject comments that need processing, but some way of getting an objective measure of how much experience a student actually had in a particular unit. There may be similarities with EHRs here - except that the stundet does not have to input the data in real time, and the consequences of errors or omissions are not that severe. So it may be a good testbed for trying out novel approaches!
If any bright ideas come my way I’ll let you know of them.
Blue skys,
Derek