Academic Data Warehouses: Tool for Medical Student Education in Medical Informatics and Population Health

Academic data warehouses are increasingly being used to support health services research and quality assessment initiatives. A less common use of such systems is in support of medical education. As new requirements for health professional competence in medical informatics emerge, data warehouses are a potentially powerful teaching tool for introducing and reinforcing these concepts. The 2nd report of the AAMC Medical Student Objectives Project describes several learning objectives related to medical informatics and population health. At the University of Virginia, we have a decade of experience with a custom-built academic data warehouse; over the past five years we have explored the educational potential of our system. In this abstract, we describe our vision for how data warehouses like our own might be useful for training in these important areas.