Integrating suitability for teaching into an electronic health record - A novel and versatile tool for medical education

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The educational literature has noted the implications of electronic health records (EHR) for patient care and discussed various implications for the learner-teacher relationship but it has so far not viewed EHR as an educational tool. We wondered whether we could use EHR to facilitate undergraduate medical students' exposure to hospital in-patients with an interesting history or findings on clinical examination. As clinicians, we encounter such patients on a regular basis during ward rounds and referrals but students are often absent during these encounters, leading to a loss of learning opportunities. Our aim was therefore to harness the EHR and create an electronic "flag" that would, following consent, document suitable inpatients and thus maximise the students' exposure to patients who present learning opportunities. With help from our IT department we developed a simple add on to our existing EHR that allows any clinician to electronically highlight and document such patients during inpatient encounters. A member of the educational faculty can, whenever required, interrogate the EHR for the presence of inpatients with interesting findings on examination in the hospital and facilitate contact with our medical students. We report details of our approach, describe early experience and potential pitfalls and suggest future applications.