Concepts, Issues, and Standards. Application of Controlled Medical Vocabularies: A Computer-Based System for Indexing Curriculum Content

Harvard Medical School has developed a computer-based system for tracking information about the medical school curriculum. Based on five years of experience with monitoring curriculum content, the system is designed for ease of use and supports searches on a number of general topic areas. These searches are then refined by review of the fields of the individual records retrieved. To facilitate the capture of data from faculty authors, the system produces a questionnaire which lists all fields and the vocabularies specified for them in a checklist format. The system is described and the lessons learned during its development and use are discussed.