AMA, collaborators provide ‘bold, innovative’ EHR training

The AMA recently announced a partnership with the Regenstrief Institute that it says will ensure more medical students and medical trainees gain real-world experience using electronic health records during their training.

“Many residents and young physicians are coming out of medical school with gaps in their ability to practice in the modern health system,” Susan Skochelak, MD, AMA vice president for medical education, said in a press release. “Too often, students enter residency training without the ability to effectively and efficiently work with EHRs, even though they are one of the primary tools physicians use in everyday practice. That is why we have been working with some of the nation’s leading medical schools to develop bold, innovative ways to improve physician training.”

According to the release, the first-of-its kind platform uses real, de- and mis-identified patient data to safely allow students to virtually care for patients with multiple, complex health conditions. The platform places orders within an application similar to real-world EHRs, records encounters, and navigates records. The new model also provides an “immersive” and “cutting-edge” way to teach students on how EHRs can address important issues related to social determinants of health, patient safety, quality improvement and population health, and can be tweaked to specific curriculum goals and evaluate students’ progress.

According to Blaine Y. Takesue, MD, a research scientist at Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, the training addresses an unmet need that is very much in demand.

“It is ironic as EHRs have proliferated in the past decade, significant medical student exposure to these systems has decreased. EHRs are a tool most physicians will use every day in their practice, and data from EHRs will impact all physicians,” Takesue said in the release. “Health professions schools regard EHR and informatics training as necessary for their students ... [this platform] will improve health care by improving the informatics ‘IQ’ of medical students and other health care profession students.”

Several schools have already adopted the platform, and other schools will begin implementing it shortly, according to the release.

The collaboration is part of AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education program that will create what AMA calls ‘the medical school of the future.’ At the beginning of the initiative, launched in 2013, $11 million in grants were provided to fund major advances at some of the nation’s medical schools with the goal of circulating new and innovative curricula to as many areas as possible. Since then, more schools have been added, and more grants have been awarded, to create new curricula that better align undergraduate medical education with the modern health care system.

Most recently, the program launched a new health systems science textbook that can be used by all medical schools to help future health care providers work their way through the changing landscape of modern health systems, with an emphasis on value-based care. by Janel Miller

Disclosure: Healio Family Medicine was unable to determine Skochelak and Takesue’s relevant financial disclosures prior to publication.