Integrating core information competencies into a traditional curriculum: a collaborative approach.

To prepare for a career, in which they keep up-to-date with current physical therapy procedures and health care trends, it is imperative that students become life-long learners. Four core competencies have been identified as skills to promote life-long learning: e-mail, professional electronic mailing lists (listservs), online data-base searching, and searching the World Wide Web. This paper discusses integrating the core competencies into the curriculum of a physical therapist assistant program through a collaborative effort between the physical therapist assistant program faculty and librarians.

The CyberDoc project: using portable computing to enhance a community-based primary care clerkship.

In July 1995, MCP-Hahnemann School of Medicine of the Allegheny University of the Health Sciences introduced its first-ever required clerkship in family medicine. It was decided that computer skills and applications would be an integral part of this rotation, and a special program, CyberDoc, was developed for the clerkship by some of the university's informatics professionals and family medicine faculty. CyberDoc is a suite of laptop-computer applications, based almost exclusively on "off-the-shelf" database and connectivity programs and designed expressly for students at community-based training sites. CyberDoc allows faculty members to track students' progress at off-site clerkships, and allows the students to access pharmaceutical and drug-interaction databases, the university's online academic information system (including MEDLINE), all basic Internet functions, e-mail, and an array of other applications. The authors briefly describe the background, goals, and structure of the CyberDoc project, as well as the preliminary outcomes of CyberDoc's pilot year.