Sometimes it’s What Not to Teach When we first started talking with the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) about what lessons they planned on teaching with the RECL Platform (formerly the tEMR application), we had no concept of what could be taught.  After all, there are a lot of variables to take into account.  Items such as the complexity of the subject matter in comparison to the year of the student, the historical knowledge of the student from previous classes, familiarity with EHR’s from job shadowing opportunities, the experience and background of the individual educators, and the list goes on. The good news is we had leaders and pioneers in medical education on our side to help guide us, which was definitely of great help. I quickly forgot that no one had tried to create a teaching tool for EHR’s at this level of […]

Start with Your Users. When Winston Churchill said, “We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.”  Mr. Churchill was not trying to build the Regenstrief EHR Clinical Learning Platform (formerly the Teaching EMR) in the twenty-first century. While collaborating with both the education team and the technical team for the past two years, I’ve learned how important point of view is.  The grant was written in the point of view and benefit of the leadership funding the work.  The technology requirements were discussed and written for a standalone system from its parent application that it got most of its intelligence from (G3), an EHR for trained physicians to use. The education pieces were designed to meet learning objectives at high standards and relate to questions that will eventually be asked on multiple medical exams, most likely years away […]

It’s a catchy title, huh?  When trying to come up with my first RECL Platform (formerly Teaching EMR – tEMR) blog post, I wondered what I would write about.  There will be posts on informatics, education, medicine, EHR’s and technology. As the Project Manager for RECL Platform (formerly tEMR), it sometimes feels like I’m supposed to know at least 10% about how everything works, so I can keep discussions going and help communicate needs between groups.  The whole responsibilities of managing the finances, timeline, and competing priorities for the team, which should be my primary concern, take a backseat with a project like this.  The communication and the relationships really come first. We learned this the hard way when RECL Platform (formerly tEMR) first started two years ago. When we first started, we had what every project leader hopes for, a documented list of requirements […]