FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE OF MEDICINE

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

The Florida State University of Medicine, founded in 2001, enrollment of approximately 500, has one of the furthest reaching computer literacy requirements of any graduate school in the country. We interviewed Nancy Clark, Director of Medical Informatics Education at Florida State University.

Clark's position was born with the school itself, a point she emphasizes in stressing that the College was founded at precisely the time when informatics had acquired growing importance in medical education. It enabled the University to promote informatics into a position of influence that it had only started to acquire at other medical schools. At Florida State, medical informatics could be fully realized from the inception. "Informatics here is highly integrated into the curriculum," says Clark, "and there is an informatics element to every course. When I started this in 2001 at that time there was not a director of informatics at the dean level. We decided that this was the only way to do this right according to the recommended guidelines by the AAMC (American Association of Medical Colleges). They wrote a report back in 1997 that suggested that it be done this way and we were the first new medical school founded since that report came out and we were the first to do it. We did it at the dean's level."

FIVE MAIN COMPONENTS OF THE INFORMATICS LITERACY PROGRAM

According to Clark, the informatics program at the College of Medicine has five distinct objectives: 1) To familiarize the students with basic computer literacy, 2) To help them master computer communications and presentation skills such as communicating with patients via email, finding patient educational materials online and using telemedicine;

3) To better understand how to use clinical information systems such as billing and coding and medical records and medical information security systems; 4) To foster information literacy involving the use of technology for lifelong learning and using medical references to master evidence based medicine skills; and 5) To develop research skills such as how to write articles, use citation managers, etc.

EQUIPMENT COSTS

The breadth of Florida State's medical informatics program involves major expenditures. The program provides a lap top computer and PDA to each incoming student "and the computers cost a few thousand per student," says Clark. Each laptop comes equipped with the Microsoft Professional Office Suite as well as the Microsoft digital image suite, Stedman's and the EndNote citation checker.

ORIENTATION & CLASSES

Each incoming student gets 3-4 hours of orientation sessions devoted to explaining the school's information technology resources. Clark may give specific classes in particular types of technology but her main aim is to integrate the technology education directly into the medical school curriculum. She gives some examples of how this is done:

"In the doctoring course they teach the students to use the PDA at the point of care as they learn to take a history and do a physical exam. In Neuroanatomy the instructor has taken on graphics so students are using digital cameras to take photographs of parts of the brain - real brains from the anatomy lab. Then they put the images into PowerPoint and they do a presentation to the class on their findings. Information Technology is an expectation and it is in our curriculum that the faculty will have some informatics component in their courses and we work together when we develop the courses."

Clark sits in on the course development committees for both Year 1 & 2 and Year 3 & 4 medical students. Clark says that it is understood that each course will have informatics education objectives.

Clark cooperates closely with the library, and the Department of Information Technology; she also has a personal assistant drafted from the business school's IT department. Clark trains faculty as well as students and conduct 3-4 workshops per year for the clinical faculty. She cooperates closely with the Dean for Faculty Development.

Clark says that faculty that spend a lot of time in their private practices may not be very up to speed in informatics. It is important to go more slowly with them than with students and other faculty who have been more a part of the information revolution over the past ten years. "Many of these guys (the clinical faculty) are new to computers," says Clark. "They might have one in their office but the girls up front deal with them. Once they see that because they are our faculty they now have access to 1400 journals online and thousands of electronic books, they realize that they can go find that article from the New England Journal of Medicine."

ONLINE TUTORIALS

Clark is not a big fan of online tutorials, at least not for her audience. "We use some of them when the vendors put together some good tutorials, but the thing about online tutorials is that they are out of date so fast. Also, getting people to do the evidence-based tutorials is wishful thinking. Medical students and doctors are very busy people and it is almost impossible for them to take an hour off. You have to get them and have them walk into a workshop and get them to turn off their cell phone. You have them for those two hours and you try to do the best you can. I am an instructional designer by trade but it is the workshops that are the most effective way to do it. They (doctors) go to conferences and they pay big bucks to go to a computer literacy workshop and it is protected time so they will pay it."

EVALUATION OF TRAINING

Clark is very pleased with the way that computer literacy skills are evaluated at Florida State.

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