Better education & evaluation in an EMR (BeeEMR)

BeeEMR – throwing light on the problem

Problem:

Using the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) in educational settings holds great promise but traditional approaches using sandbox EMRs present many challenges. A virtual EMR approach, with integrated activity metrics and learning analytics, can solve many of these.

Background:

There are many factors which make the use of a standard EMR structure difficult in an educational setting. We have detailed many of these already and invite those who are interested in exploring the challenges to refer to these notes:

• Functional requirements of an Educational EMR
• Why not just modify an EMR for learning?

We have been using a powerful open-source educational research platform, OpenLabyrinth (http://openlabyrinth.ca), for some years to create virtual scenarios for learning. OpenLabyrinth has been in steady use around the world since 2002 and used in a wide variety of educational and research programs. In versions 2 and 3, many authors created cases which were powerful but also had limitations.

Advantages of current approach:

1. Powerful tracking and learner metrics already available

2. Adaptive learning, rule-based branching pathways

Limitations of current approaches:

1. Original OpenLabyrinth v3 cases have a static uninteresting appearance

2. Cases based on Articulate and Captivate more visually pleasing but provide limited analytics on how they are used; predominantly linear pathways;

3. Long development cycles, typically 4-6 weeks per case.