Standards in medical education

The presentations in this session explores the issue of standards for health education. The session comprised three talks, each of which went over more or less the same ground, but with differing emphasis and levels of detail.

The present talk identified needs for standards, for example, to achieve interoperability, but also noted that the Medical Informatics community has been largely inactive on standards. However, this is less so of the Medical Education community where some groundwork has been covered, particularly in the USA. Areas where standards are needed include competencies, learner profile, evaluation, QA and IP rights. Some examples sited were the mEducator metadata scheme RDF model; European Qualifications Framework (EQF); European ICT Professional Profiles; EU-US Roadmap; HITCOMP Tool; MEDBIQ; and Medbiquitous.

It was noted that standards are needed for multiple purposes, examples being: Activity Report for Continued Education Certificates; Competence Framework which address learning outcomes and objectives; Curriculum Inventory; Healthcare Learning Object Metadata which standardize concepts of curriculum management, share resources and integrate them into Clinical Decision Support, health records and portfolios;Healthcare Professional Profile; Medical Education Metric; and MedBiquitous Virtual Patient -

This presentation was largely a list of important standards efforts, but did not present a clear synthesis to bring together the concepts within an overarching model or framework.

There were no questions from the audience.