IT infrastructure in med school

[tivark]

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as a student rep, Ive been recently told to come up with proposals on how to improve the IT department of my medical school. Now, having already ask students and heard some pretty trivial suggestions, id like to know from people that have already gone thru med school and are in their residencies.

my main objective of this study is to recommend changes that can improve learning outcomes for students/ make them better students/future doctors. that outrules one suggestion by a student to have wireless in the carpark. sounded a bit far off.


so the questions are:

what IT infrastructure(s) do you find to be extremely helpful for you thru in med school now?

how do you wish your med school can improve, IT wise?

so i guess this entails wireless access, distribution of PDA, PDA softwares? access to journals etc.

oh thanks in advance folks. truly appreciate it.

 

[NonTradMed]

The best thing my school could do is to extend their video lectures to encompass some of the other picture intensive courses such as gross anatomy. I missed one day of class and it took me forever to make up for it. I had to go through the slides and make the annotations and then listen to the lecture. Took me way longer than if I could just watch a video version of it streaming online.

 

[MossPoh]

This is a particulary difficult question with lots of research going on..or areas simliar to it. The problem is that users are very rarely self-aware of what needs improving unless it is blatantly obvious. They only realize once you integrate some new technology and it catches on. It is good that you are thinking about a part of the users instead of just coming up with stuff and throwing it out there...but you need to factor in the entire scope of users, how it will affect them in the future (cost, etc), how the prof's curriculum will be altered, and all sorts of stuff. I don't know what your background is in but check out some HCI, project management, and a few other books. Surveys are ok but they really don't take everything into account. A good way is to simply get permission and videotape users, in this case studying, or however they use technology..ask them to talk aloud while doing their tasks. Try to see what their concerns are...some of the most frustrating and time consuming things are just digging through horribly disorganized interfaces with no logical order to them, bad color combination. too small of fonts and everything else. If you are really serious about this you can get in contact with me and I can talk to some of my current professors.....they love to have students do real life projects with clients...and it'd essentially be free to you. I can't guarentee it'd happen but I know now I am doing a project for IBM, Vis.align, campus police, and helping edit my prof and some vp woman at yahoo's book(not as impressive as it sounds...mainly saying something is overly complicated, or just a typo, etc)...so my major is really into real world experience.