EMERGENCY MEDICINE CLERKSHIP ENCOUNTER AND PROCEDURE LOGGING USING HANDHELD COMPUTERS
Tracking medical student clinical encounters became an accreditation requirement of medical schools in 2005. At University of Toronto Medical School, a pilot project using handheld computers was developed in the Department of Family and Community Medicine – called "eLog". Working with the Faculty of Medicine Academic Computing Department, I adapted the Family Medicine elog for the Emergency Medicine setting. This entailed developing new screenshots with encounters and procedures specific for EM. During the first year of implementation, I evaluated the technical feasibility and student satisfaction with this electronic logging and feedback program.
The eLog program allowed the medical school to move towards complying with the LCME ED2 accreditation standard that requires “faculty to define the types of patients and clinical conditions that students must encounter … with central oversight”. As medical education was moving towards a more distributive model with students being trained in community sites, there was an additional need to monitor the experiences at these community sites. “eLog” had provided course administrators with detailed insight into the variability of clinical experience across all sites.
My results were published in Academic Emergency Medicine and and 2 abstracts were published in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine.
