AMA reveals new platform to train medical students to use EHRs

The American Medical Association last week continued its push to ensure that doctors-in-training are equipped to practice in medicine's digital age by teaching them how to use electronic health records.

The program, created by the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute, will provide students access to misidentified and deidentified​ EHR information, filling a gap in medical education that's becoming more apparent as EHR use grows.

The Regenstrief EHR Clinical Learning Platform uses records from 11,000 patients, allowing medical students to use digital records for patient care and broader-scale tasks, such as population health management and addressing the social determinants of health.

Letting medical students go through school without learning how to use EHRs is "comparable to a physician leaving medical school without learning how to use a stethoscope," Dr. Susan Skochelak, the AMA's group vice president of medical education, said during an AMA call to announce the platform.

The platform, part of the AMA's efforts to create the "medical school of the future," draws data from Eskenazi Health. It was developed with a $1 million AMA grant to the IU School of Medicine to work with the Regenstrief Institute.

IU medical students have used the platform for more than a year, and that UConn School of Medicine and Southern Indiana University School of Nursing have added it to their curricula. Now, the platform is being expanded to other U.S. medical schools.

The platform is the latest effort from the AMA to get medical schools to incorporate EHRs into their curricula. In 2015, the AMA introduced a policy to encourage EHR education. Some schools already offering EHR training use simulated data. But such systems "were designed to train users on the system, not to deliver education content," said Lisa Welch, Regenstrief's communication manager.

Regenstrief platform data "more closely simulates what students are going to deal with in real-life practice," said Dr. Blaine Takesue, assistant professor of clinical medicine at IU and a Regenstrief research scientist. "Being able to filter data to identify what the priorities are" is essential, he said.