Educating K-12 Professionals and Parents: Finding Health Information for Special Needs Children.

A successful partnership model between an academic health sciences library and a K-12 school district to provide librarians, nurses, and special education staff with access to health information to support special needs children and their parents is presented. Train-the-trainer staff sessions and a parent session were collaboratively developed. Funding support was used to purchase iPads for librarians and nurses to deliver mobile support. The results indicate the resources taught are being used to find health information and the school librarians and nurses are being sought after to assist in finding health information. Positive feedback from the school district indicates this model could be replicated in similar settings.

Health information technology and the medical school curriculum.

Medical schools must teach core biomedical informatics competencies that address health information technology (HIT), including explaining electronic medical record systems and computerized provider order entry systems and their role in patient safety; describing the research uses and limitations of a clinical data warehouse; understanding the concepts and importance of information system interoperability; explaining the difference between biomedical informatics and HIT; and explaining the ways clinical information systems can fail. Barriers to including these topics in the curricula include lack of teachers; the perception that informatics competencies are not applicable during preclinical courses and there is no place in the clerkships to teach them; and the legal and policy issues that conflict with students' need to develop skills. However, curricular reform efforts are creating opportunities to teach these topics with new emphasis on patient safety, team-based medical practice, and evidence-based care. Overarching HIT competencies empower our students to be lifelong technology learners.

Isolated to integrated: an evolving medical informatics curriculum.

A library-led introductory informatics theme has been part of the Albany Medical College undergraduate medical school curriculum as a concurrent theme since 1993. Initially, classes were limited to large group sessions focusing on general searching skills. Over the past several years, course content has been expanded and increasingly integrated into other themes and clerkships. Web-based self-paced tutorials have replaced many classroom sessions, and Web 2.0 technologies have been introduced. Collaborations with clinical and basic science faculty in other themes supplement and strengthen the theme.