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JMIR Medical Education

Technology, innovation, and openness in medical education in the information age.

Editor-in-Chief:

Blake J. Lesselroth, MD MBI FACP FAMIA, University of Oklahoma | OU-Tulsa Schusterman Center; University of Victoria, British Columbia


Impact Factor 13.9 More information about Impact Factor CiteScore 16.0 More information about CiteScore

JMIR Medical Education is an open access, peer-reviewed journal focusing on technology, innovation, and openness in medical education.This includes e-learning and virtual training, which has gained critical relevance in the (post-)COVID world. Another focus is on how to train health professionals to use 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 digital learning objects for medical education and urge authors to make their tools and learning objects freely available (we may also publish them as a 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 from various health professions to submit short essays and viewpoints on all aspects of medical education, particularly suggestions on improving medical education and suggestions for new technologies, applications, and approaches. 

The journal is indexed in MEDLINE, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, DOAJ, and the Science Citation Index Expanded (Clarivate).

JMIR Medical Education received a 2025 Impact Factor of 13.9, ranking Q1 in Education, Scientific Disciplines (1/89).

JMIR Medical Education received a Scopus CiteScore of 16.0 (2025), placing it in the 98th percentile (20/1698) as a first quartile (Q1) journal in the field of Education, and in the 97th percentile (19/669) as a first quartile (Q1) journal in the field of General Medicine.


Recent Articles

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medical Education

Generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), may enable personalized learning in medical education. In otolaryngology–head and neck surgery (ear, nose, and throat [ENT]) education, AI may support knowledge retrieval, adaptive assessment, feedback, and scalable learning, but evidence remains fragmented.

Two medical professionals in blue scrubs examine urology scans on interactive displays.
Viewpoint and Opinions on Innovation in Medical Education

Urology education must prepare learners to integrate anatomical visualization, diagnostic reasoning, technical performance, communication, and ethical judgment, often under restricted working hours and limited access to high-fidelity cases. This viewpoint argues that large language models (LLMs) and metaverse-related technologies should be integrated as complementary, supervised educational tools rather than treated as autonomous replacements for educators or clinical experience. LLMs can support cognitive apprenticeship, documentation practice, assessment, and communication simulations, whereas extended reality, cloud computing, and virtual digital humans can support spatial, procedural, and remote learning. Our aim is to articulate 3 key messages: first, the educational value of these technologies depends on alignment with defined urological competencies; second, implementation should proceed in stages from governed data infrastructure to intelligent interaction and immersive multimodal training; and third, educational effectiveness must be established through prospective evaluations of transfer to clinical performance, not through technical novelty alone. We emphasize the need for rigorous randomized controlled trials, identify requirements for haptic and biomechanical fidelity, and discuss hallucination, bias, privacy, accountability, and deskilling. The responsible future of intelligent urology education will therefore require collaboration among learners, educators, clinicians, engineers, ethicists, institutions, and professional bodies.

Three professionals collaborating on documents at a modern office desk
Viewpoint and Opinions on Innovation in Medical Education

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping clinical research, diagnostics, health system operations, and medical education. Frontier generative AI development is increasingly concentrated in private industry, whose computational infrastructure, proprietary datasets, and capital exceed those of most academic institutions. Although not designed exclusively for medicine, these systems increasingly influence clinical applications. This shift raises a question for academic medical centers (AMCs): What role remains when leading AI systems emerge outside universities? This viewpoint examines industry’s growing role in generative AI, clarifies AMCs’ responsibilities, and proposes a framework for AI governance and literacy across undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education (CME). Rather than compete with industry on computational scale, AMCs should reinforce functions for which AMCs have distinctive strengths. These include (1) mechanistic inquiry linking algorithmic outputs to biological and pathophysiologic understanding; (2) interdisciplinary synthesis integrating clinical, ethical, legal, and sociotechnical perspectives; (3) independent and methodologically rigorous validation of clinical AI tools; and (4) institutional stewardship of ethical governance for patient populations that are often underrepresented in commercial datasets. As nonprofit institutions training clinicians, AMCs have a distinct role in safeguarding transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI-enabled health care. We position this 4-role framework to refine AI governance and translational medicine approaches, clarifying which responsibilities AMCs should retain while collaborating with industry. The approach includes longitudinal AI literacy training across undergraduate medical education, graduate medical education, and CME, standardized pathways for evaluating clinical AI, stronger conflict-of-interest safeguards, and complementary partnerships with industry and regulators. We also outline educational assessment methods and safety-monitoring processes, including competency-based assessment across undergraduate medical education, graduate medical education, and CME, postdeployment monitoring, and clear escalation triggers. Embedding verification habits and governance into training and practice can help ensure that generative AI supports clinical reasoning while preserving trust, equity, and scientific rigor. This viewpoint addresses academic leaders, curriculum committees, residency directors, faculty developers, and accreditors. Safe clinical AI requires sustained academic leadership.

Industrial machine with cartridges being loaded into rails
Simulation

Simulation-based education is increasingly used in medical training to safely develop clinical skills. However, the perceived relevance of a simulation (“utility value”) to a learner’s future work may influence its effectiveness.

Classroom with desks, a teacher's desk, and a world map on the wall.
Undergraduate Education for Future Healthcare Professionals

The undergraduate stage is critical for developing nursing students’ disaster nursing competencies; however, traditional lecture-based teaching often fails to promote active learning, and innovative instructional models remain underused in this field. The BOPPPS (Bridge-in, Objective, Preassessment, Participatory Learning, Postassessment, and Summary) model is a student-centered, closed-loop instructional framework that emphasizes active participatory learning and real-time feedback.

Heatmap on computer screen showing faculty rater vs. observation number Phi values
Specialist Training for Doctors

Competency-based medical education increasingly uses digital workplace assessment platforms to collect longitudinal evidence of trainees’ readiness for progressive responsibility. Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) translate competencies into observable clinical work, but individual workplace observations are context-dependent and may not support dependable progression decisions. Empirical guidance remains limited on how many observations, faculty raters, EPA titles, and workplace settings are needed for a dependable EPA portfolio.

Doctor using tablet with AI learning icons for medical training
Viewpoint and Opinions on Innovation in Medical Education

Continuing medical education (CME) and continuing professional development (CPD) systems have traditionally relied on time-based credit allocation, using participation duration as a proxy for professional learning. Although administratively simple and scalable, this model does not reliably demonstrate whether physicians have engaged in meaningful learning, improved clinical reasoning, or critically appraised evidence. The emergence of generative AI creates an opportunity to rethink how physician learning is documented, assessed, and credited. This viewpoint proposes the Case-based Learning Intelligence Credit System (CLICS), a conceptual framework for translating AI-mediated clinical learning interactions into auditable evidence of reasoning-related engagement that could support CME/CPD credit. CLICS introduces the professional learning episode (PLE) as the basic unit of creditable learning: a coherent AI-mediated interaction demonstrating a clinically meaningful problem, reasoning development through iterative inquiry, contextual or evidentiary integration, and reflective synthesis. PLEs are evaluated using the proposed Practice Intelligence Score-7 (PIS-7) rubric, subject to human calibration and oversight; the rubric assesses observable reasoning behavior within the episode rather than the AI’s answer, and qualifying PLEs may be translated into CME/CPD credit through threshold-based, human-auditable conversion rules. CLICS is not intended to replace traditional CME but to extend it as an optional, evidence-generating pathway for personalized, practice-embedded professional development. Its implementation requires iterative validation, stratified human audit, privacy-by-design architecture, antigaming controls, bias monitoring, and professional oversight. If validated, CLICS may enable identification of domain-specific areas for improvement and support personalized, adaptive learning pathways.

Doctor reviewing CT scan of lungs on computer screen in medical office
Professional Identity Development

The integration of AI into health care is increasingly shaping clinical practice and decision-making. Beyond technical performance, AI has implications for professional roles, clinical reasoning, and responsibility. Understanding how medical students and clinicians perceive AI, how these perceptions relate to professional identity concerns, and how clinicians evaluate AI-supported decisions in different clinical contexts is therefore important for both implementation and medical education.

Doctors review medical data on a tablet showing brain and body scans.
Viewpoint and Opinions on Innovation in Medical Education

Early discussions of generative language models in medical education emphasized their promise for simulation, digital patients, individualized feedback, learner assessment, health information dissemination, research support, and translation, while also warning about bias, privacy, academic integrity, misinformation, legal ambiguity, and unequal access. Since that first wave, generative AI has moved from novelty to routine exposure for learners, educators, researchers, and institutions. Medical education therefore needs a more mature framework than a catalog of opportunities and risks. This viewpoint argues that the next phase should be organized around educational entrustment: determining which functions can be delegated to AI systems, under what conditions, with what human supervision, and with what evidence of benefit. Building on recent proposals to apply entrustment to AI in health professions education, we operationalize the concept into a graduated, function-level model that specifies which educational functions may be delegated; at what stakes; and with what oversight, assessment, and governance. We classify use cases by educational stakes and AI autonomy and outline implications for assessment redesign, curriculum development, faculty capability, cognitive autonomy, equity, and institutional governance. The central challenge is whether medical schools can integrate these tools in ways that preserve clinical reasoning, professional identity, accountability, and fairness. The next generation of research should move beyond model performance on examinations and evaluate how AI changes learning, judgment, behavior, and patient care.

AI in public health: Woman analyzes data on screen, diverse group watches
Viewpoint and Opinions on Innovation in Medical Education

The continuous development of AI presents unprecedented opportunities for public health. This development prompts educators and researchers to consider how AI can be applied to and integrated into a rapidly evolving global landscape in which AI is reshaping health systems. In turn, this generates an urgent need for structured proposals that bridge theory and practice. In this viewpoint, we present perspectives and proposals on AI applications in public health. We operationalize AI literacy as a core public health competency, defined through knowledge, skills, and attitudes and scaled across professional roles. For education, we describe how AI can support learners, teachers, and organizations through personalized learning experiences, dynamic scenarios, immersive simulations, content preparation, and communication strategies. For research, we analyze how AI can be embedded as a transversal enabler supporting the World Health Organization’s essential public health functions. We emphasize that AI should enhance, rather than replace, human capabilities and propose that AI literacy should be recognized as a core public health competency. We suggest that harnessing AI for public health education and research is, therefore, less a technological challenge than a collective responsibility shared by educators, researchers, and institutions.

VR simulation of medical injection training with syringes and virtual objects.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Medical Education

Our research group previously developed a virtual reality (VR) training module for radiopharmaceutical administration, focusing on procedural skills and patient interactions. The module’s educational effectiveness was validated with objective measures, such as electroencephalography and mood assessments.

MedisimVR virtual reality simulation lab with VR headsets
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Medical Education

Extended reality technologies, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality, and mixed reality, are increasingly used in medical education to create immersive and interactive learning environments. As these modalities expand, validated instruments are needed to measure learners’ experiences accurately. The Immersive Technology Evaluation Measure (ITEM) is a multidomain questionnaire assessing immersion, motivation, cognitive load, usability, and debriefing. Although cognitive interviewing informed its original development, less is known about how ITEM questions function when used in a different linguistic and educational context.

Preprints Open for Peer Review

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