Integrating Electronic Health Records Into Health Professional and Health Informatics Education: A Continuum of Approaches

There is a need to update and modernize health professional education to expose students to the latest health information technologies in their training and education. In particular, the electronic health record (EHR) promises to modernize and streamline healthcare. There are many programs internationally that aim to deploy these systems on a wide scale for all health professionals (including doctors, nurses and health informatics professionals) to use. However, the issue of how to train both health professionals and health informatics students about electronic health records has been problematic. In this paper we first provide a framework we have developed for guiding our educational efforts in integrating this type of information technology into education. We then describe a Webbased portal developed at the University of Victoria designed for remotely providing health professional and health informatics students with ubiquitous access to a range of electronic health records. The portal has allowed us to explore integration of electronic health records into health professional and health informatics education in a number of ways on a variety of educational projects to date.