AMA Aims to Help Med Students Work with EHRs

The American Medical Association wants to help medical students deal with the reality of working within electronic health record (EHR) systems. They launched a new program, the brainchild of Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute, to grant med students access to misidentified and deidentified EHR information in the classroom before they enter clerkships in order to address a gap between clinical medical education and practical skills needed in the practice setting. The Regenstrief EHR Clinical Learning Platform gives the students a chance to work hands-on with digital records for individual patient care and broader-scale tasks, such as population health management. Dr. Susan Skochelak, group vice president of medical education at the AMA, says minting doctors who don’t know how to navigate an EHR is like “a physician leaving medical school without learning how to use a stethoscope.”  IU School of Medicine students have been using the platform for more than a year, as have those at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and Southern Indiana University. Plans to continue rolling it out to other schools are already in place, in line with of an AMA policy to help ensure medical students get experience using EHRs before the enter the workplace.