In my spare time over the past two years I've been teaching myself web programming. As a "computer person" I feel like the medical education experience could be improved so much with the use of the technology we have available to us. I wanted to know if there's demand for a medical education forum. During my rotations, like many others, I use Uptodate as the go to site for clinical information, but I often find that it is more information than I'm looking for at the time and doesn't answer my question from a student perspective. My idea would be for a site that gives students access to FAQs, fast facts, and 'main themes.' It would allow students to post information, experiences, and tips for rotations (or courses, although I'd like to focus more on the clinical aspect). If there was enough use (I know, I'm really reaching here), there could be school specific boards. My school does have a board for students in a class to ask questions but there isn't a way for us to learn from the experience of the class ahead of us or to share our general tips and experiences with each other, and I'm merely assuming that other schools don't have such a system for doing so. I'll try to give an example of what I mean. I'm currently on an allergy & immunology rotation. My first week of the rotation would have been so much more beneficial if I understood certain core concepts coming in, such as skin prick testing. Although I did some reading before starting my rotation, it wouldn't have occurred to me to read specifically about skin prick testing unless someone told me. And it wouldn't need to be in-depth like a journal article or uptodate passage. Some may post something like: "Skin prick testing is a diagnostic tool for determining specific IgE mediated allergies. The patient has a negative control (saline) and a positive control (histamine) placed on the skin. Selected allergens will be compared to the negative and positive control to determine if the patient may be allergic. The skin test is highly sensitive and so is very useful for ruling out specific allergies. However, a positive result must be correlated with patient history because false positives are common. Also for this reason, possible allergens should be tested based on the history. If a patient tolerates eating peanuts, then peanuts should not be included in the testing. Of note, it is also important to distinguish IgE mediated reactions versus non-IgE mediate reactions which are not associated with positive results on skin test.” Below the post other students would be able to comment to suggest changes or remark on the usefulness of the information. For comparison, the uptodate page “overview of skin testing for allergic disease” is about 6000 words long, not including the summary. My example a 130 word blurb that gives a concise answer. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked for an answer or tried to think about what I should know but got lost in the wealth of information available. Overall the idea is that a student would come to this site before starting a rotation to gain a general concept of things they might need to know or if they are looking for a quick answer to help lead them in the right direction. This is all still a rough idea, so any thoughts are welcome.
Barriers to this concept: Posted information may not be correct. Experiences vary between individual students as well as between schools.
Is this something you would find useful? Do you have any suggestions? Can you think of other barriers?
Barriers to this concept: Posted information may not be correct. Experiences vary between individual students as well as between schools.
Is this something you would find useful? Do you have any suggestions? Can you think of other barriers?
