A Virtual Course in Biomedical and Health Informatics for Medical Students

Medical students from around the US (and the world) have had their education displaced by the Covid-19 pandemic. In many places, there is either desire to keep them away from risk or to preserve personal protecting equipment (PPE) to physicians, nurses, and others directly involved in patient care. As such, the medical education community has worked to identify virtual educational experiences for medical students.

Our contribution is a virtual course in biomedical and health informatics. Readers familiar with my work will recognize the content of this course as emanating from the introductory course in the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. This course is also used in OHSU's offering as part of the American Medical Informatics Association 10x10 ("ten by ten") program. The syllabus for the course details on how medical schools can enroll their students.

We are implementing the course as a 4-week medical student elective, which is awarded 2 credits at OHSU. The course has about 40 hours of lecture, and we anticipate another 40 hours spent on discussion forums, multiple-choice self-assessments for each unit, and optional readings. The course is graded as pass-fail, and passing requires completion of all of 10 units and their self-assessments over the 4 weeks of the course. Due to high demand, we are limiting enrollment to students in US-based allopathic and osteopathic medical schools.

One new offering of the course will begin each week starting Monday, April 6. We will enroll as many students as we have in a single section, and make all of the content available to them for the duration of the 4 weeks. We will make use of the discussion forums built into our LMS to answer questions they have, and raise a few questions for them to answer. At the end of 4 weeks, the course will end, and those who have completed all of the work will receive a passing grade, which we will report back to the contact from each school.

We are asking each medical school handle student enrollment and credit themselves. In other words, we will make the course available through our learning management system (LMS) at OHSU, but we will ask each school to provide us a list of students to enroll and each will get a login to the course. After the course is done, we will report back to the schools on whether each student completed the course or not. We would like for medical schools that participate to handle giving students credit (probably through some sort of self-study elective).

We also prefer that there be a single point of contact for each school with which we communicate. To capture this information, we have created an online survey that asks for the point of contact (please use a university email address), estimated number of students (initially up to 20 per school - we may be able to accommodate more later), and preferred dates (which we may need to change to balance load). After the survey is completed, someone from our staff will contact the schools to work out the details.

In addition, for those interested in less than a full course on informatics, we have an open Web site that provides some of the materials and is being used by some medical schools.