Baltimore, Maryland, USA, May 28, 2013. Medical schools and schools of other health professions are changing how and what they teach their students. A new standard from MedBiquitous will help track changes to health professions curricula on a broad scale.
“Many schools are changing their curricula to be competency-based and incorporate more innovative methods for teaching and assessment.” said Peter Greene, M.D., Executive Director of MedBiquitous and Chief Medical Information Officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine. “The MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory provides a way to look across curricula and see the trends.”
The MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory, ANSI/MEDBIQ CI.10.1-2013, is a technical standard for representing a school’s curriculum in XML. Curriculum management systems implementing the standard can create a representation of a school’s curriculum using the standard. Once the curriculum is in this standard format, the school can send it to a central database for analysis, benchmarking, and research. The standard includes the ability to tie curricula to competency frameworks. Starting in September, 2013, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) will pilot a new system that allows member medical schools in the U.S. and Canada to upload detailed curriculum data from their home-based curriculum management systems utilizing the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory standard. The dataset will enable enhanced reporting capabilities based on the content of these reports. Development of the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory standard was funded by the AAMC.
“The standard allows for so much more flexibility in reporting the structure of a school’s curriculum and its relationship to competencies,” said Terri Cameron, Director of Curriculum Management at the Association of American Medical Colleges. “The standard also streamlines the data reporting process. Data is exported from the school’s local curriculum management system for uploading to the central system, and that saves time and ensures greater accuracy.”
MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory builds on the MedBiquitous Competency Framework, ANSI /MEDBIQ CF.10.1-2012, and allows schools to represent how competencies are addressed in the curriculum. It also provides a common vocabulary of defined terms for instructional methods, assessment methods, and resources.
“Having a common vocabulary for instructional methods, assessment methods, and resources is enormously valuable,” said Susan Albright, Director of Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase and co-chair of the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory Working Group. “Now schools can get a more accurate sense of how they are teaching and assessing and compare that to national or regional norms.”
“Schools implementing the standard will be able to get a much better sense of the content of their curriculum,” added Marc Triola, M.D., Associate Dean for Educational Informatics at New York University School of Medicine and fellow co-chair of the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory Working Group. “Schools can see where the gaps are in their curriculum and address them. The standard will be helpful to schools preparing for accreditation review, too.”
The standard can be downloaded from the MedBiquitous website, http://www.medbiq.org.
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About MedBiquitous
Founded by Johns Hopkins Medicine and leading professional medical societies, the MedBiquitous Consortium is creating a technology blueprint for the health professions. Based on XML and Web services standards, this blueprint will seamlessly support the health care learner in ways that will improve patient care and simplify the administrative work associated with education and quality improvement. MedBiquitous also provides a neutral forum for educators and industry alike to exchange ideas about innovative uses of Web technologies for health professions education and quality improvement. It is the mission of MedBiquitous to develop and promote technology standards for the health professions that advance lifelong learning, continuous improvement, and better patient outcomes. For more information on MedBiquitous, please visit www.medbiq.org.