Designing an Electronic Medical Case Simulator for Health Professional Education

This paper describes an implementation of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) which has been adapted for the purposes of teaching health professional students, including medical and nursing students. Off-the-shelf EMR software, while suited for physicians in practice settings does not completely satisfy the needs of these students and educators. There are many unique requirements of a teaching EMR compared to one used in a production environment. This paper describes the specific architecture and unique features of an EMR that was employed in the University of British Columbia Medical School teaching program in December, 2007 with 200 participating medical students distributed across three physical sites in the Province of British Columbia.