Using the electronic health record to provide audit and feedback in medical student clerkships

TL;DR

This paper explores how electronic health records can be used to provide better feedback to medical students during their clinical training.

Contribution

The paper introduces the use of EHR auto-logging and notifications as novel tools for formative feedback in medical student clerkships.

Findings

EHR data can be leveraged to create meaningful educational tools for medical students.

Predictive and prescriptive analytics in EHRs offer new opportunities for student feedback.

Collaboration between educators and developers is needed to improve student-level patient attribution.

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of the electronic health record (EHR) to generate meaningful formative feedback for medical students in the clinical setting. Despite the scores of clinical data housed within the EHR, medical educators have only just begun to tap into this data to enhance student learning. Literature to-date has focused almost exclusively on resident education.

Development of EHR auto-logging and triggered notifications are discussed as specific use cases in providing enhanced feedback for medical students.

By incorporating predictive and prescriptive analytics into the EHR, there is an opportunity to create powerful educational tools which may also support general clinical activity.

This article explores the possibilities of EHR as an educational resource. This serves as a call to action for educators and technology developers to work together on creating health record user-centric tools, acknowledging the ongoing work done to improve student-level attribution to patients.

EHR analytics and tools present a novel approach to enhancing clinical clerkship education for medical students.