Improving patient care: the use of a digital teaching file to enhance clinicians' access to the intellectual capital of interdepartmental conferences.

OBJECTIVE: We describe a simple method for creating teaching cases from clinical data, radiologic images, surgical images, and images from pathologic slides that are presented at tumor board conferences. CONCLUSION: The resulting interdisciplinary case files are of educational value both during and after conference presentations and can be used by clinicians to gather appropriate historical, laboratory, imaging, surgical, and pathologic data on their patients. This system improves the efficiency and accuracy in gathering patient histories when care is transferred among clinics, the emergency department, and wards.