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Technology, innovation and openess in medical education in the information age
JMIR Medical Education (JME) is a Pubmed-indexed, peer-reviewed journal with focus on technology, innovation and openess in medical education. Another focus is on how to train health professionals in the use of digital tools. We publish original research, reviews, viewpoint and policy papers on innovation and technology in medical education. As an open access journal we have a special interest in open and free tools and digitial learning objects for medical education, and urge authors to make their tools and learning objects freely available (we may also publish them as Multimedia Appendix). We also invite submissions of non-conventional articles (e.g. open medical education material and software resources that are not yet evaluated but free for others to use/implement).
In our "Students' Corner", we invite students and trainees in the health professions to submit short essays and viewpoints on all aspects of medical education, but in particular suggestions on how to improve medical education, and suggestions for new technologies, applications and approaches (no article processing fees).
A sister journal of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), a leading eHealth journal (Impact Factor 2016: 5.175), the scope of JME is broader and includes non-Internet approaches to improve education, training and assessment for medical professionals and allied health professions.
Articles published in JME will be submitted to PubMed and Pubmed Central. JME is open access.
Background: Good clinician-patient communication is essential to quality health care, and key to patient centered care. However, individuals and organizations seeking to improve in this area face sign...
Background: Good clinician-patient communication is essential to quality health care, and key to patient centered care. However, individuals and organizations seeking to improve in this area face significant challenges. A major barrier is the absence of an efficient system for assessing clinicians’ communication skills and providing meaningful, individual-level feedback. Objective: Our objective was to design and create the Video-Based Communication Assessment (VCA™), an innovative, flexible online system for assessing and ultimately enhancing clinicians’ communication skills. Methods: We began by elaborating a vision of the VCA. Specifically, we determined that the assessment system should be: 1) convenient and efficient, accessible via computer, tablet or smartphone; 2) case-based, using video patient vignettes to which users respond as if speaking to the patient in the vignette; 3) flexible, allowing content to be tailored to the purpose of the assessment; 4) incorporate the patient’s voice by crowdsourcing ratings from analog patients; 5) provide robust feedback including ratings, links to highly rated responses (i.e., exemplars), and learning points; and 6) ultimately have strong psychometric properties. We collected feedback on the concept and then proceeded to develop the system. We identified several important research questions which will be answered in subsequent studies. Results: The VCA is not a single, immutable assessment, but rather an assessment system that can be adapted and tailored to assess a variety of communication skills. Much like standardized patient-based assessments where case content is varied depending on the purpose of the assessment, VCA vignettes can be created to assess specific skills. For example, one set of VCA vignettes could be created to assess skill in providing information in a general medicine outpatient context, while another set of vignettes could be created to assess skill in disclosing medical errors. Our goal in creating the first set of VCA vignettes was to assess communication skills broadly, using clinical situations that would be familiar and relevant to providers from a variety of backgrounds. Conclusions: The VCA is a flexible, innovative system for assessing clinician-patient communication. It enables efficient sampling of clinicians’ communication skills, supports crowdsourced ratings of these spoken samples, and multi-faceted feedback reports.
The purpose of this report is two-fold. First, we review the interpretation of observational studies from the standpoint of an internal medicine journal club format. A Second purpose is to share/provi...
The purpose of this report is two-fold. First, we review the interpretation of observational studies from the standpoint of an internal medicine journal club format. A Second purpose is to share/provide an example using the GRADE criteria. GRADE is a validated tool used to quantitively assess the overall quality of a study. To illustrate, we selected a study assessing the risk of spontaneous abortion (SAB) after influenza vaccine administration. Since 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) have recommended influenza vaccination of pregnant women. Previous studies have not found an association between influenza vaccination and SAB. However, in a recent case-control study by Donahue.J. et al, a correlation for SAB in women who received the H1N1 influenza vaccine was identified. This correlation was observed in the first 28 days after influenza vaccine administration. Our goal is to enable our learners to critique the published literature using appropriate evaluation tools.