Integrating suitability for teaching into an electronic health record - A novel and versatile tool for medical education.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The educational literature has noted the implications of electronic health records (EHR) for patient care and discussed various implications for the learner-teacher relationship but it has so far not viewed EHR as an educational tool. We wondered whether we could use EHR to facilitate undergraduate medical students' exposure to hospital in-patients with an interesting history or findings on clinical examination. As clinicians, we encounter such patients on a regular basis during ward rounds and referrals but students are often absent during these encounters, leading to a loss of learning opportunities. Our aim was therefore to harness the EHR and create an electronic "flag" that would, following consent, document suitable inpatients and thus maximise the students' exposure to patients who present learning opportunities. With help from our IT department we developed a simple add on to our existing EHR that allows any clinician to electronically highlight and document such patients during inpatient encounters. A member of the educational faculty can, whenever required, interrogate the EHR for the presence of inpatients with interesting findings on examination in the hospital and facilitate contact with our medical students. We report details of our approach, describe early experience and potential pitfalls and suggest future applications.

Twelve tips for turning quality assurance data into undergraduate teaching awards: A quality improvement and student engagement initiative.

Data on teaching awards in undergraduate medical education are sparse. The benefits of an awards system may seem obvious at first glance. However, there are also potential problems relating to fairness, avoidance of bias, and alignment of the awards system with a wider strategy for quality improvement and curriculum development. Here, we report five- year single center experience with establishing undergraduate teaching awards in a large academic teaching hospital. Due to lack of additional funding we based our awards not on peer review but mainly on existing and very comprehensive quality assurance (QA) data. Our 12 tips describe practical points but also pitfalls with awards categories and criteria, advertising and disseminating the awards, the actual awards ceremony and finally embedding the awards in the hospital's wider strategy. To be truly successful, teaching awards and prizes need to be carefully considered, designed and aligned with a wider institutional strategy of rewarding enthusiastic educators.