Bringing electronic patient records into health professional education: towards an integrative framework.

In this paper we discuss our approach for integrating electronic patient records into health professional education. Electronic patient record (EPR) use is increasing globally. The EPR is considered the cornerstone of the modernization and streamlining of healthcare worldwide. However, despite the importance of the EPR, health professional education in much of the world provides health professional students (who will become the practicing health professionals of the future) with limited access or knowledge about the EPR. New ways of exposing students to EPRs will be needed in order to ensure that health professionals will adopt and use this complex technology wisely and effect the positive benefits EPRs are expected to bring to healthcare globally. In this paper we describe: (a) a framework we have developed for integrating EPRs into health professional education and (b) an innovative Web portal, known as the University of Victoria Electronic Health Record (EHR) Educational Portal (which houses a number of EPRs) that can be used to explore the integration of EPRs in health professional education. It is hoped that adoption and use of EPRs will ultimately be improved through the use of the portal to allow students virtual and ubiquitous access to example EPRs, coupled with principled educational approaches for integrating EPR technology into health professional curricula.

The University of Victoria Interdisciplinary Electronic Health Record Educational Portal.

Use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems is increasing globally. However, adoption rates of Health Information Systems (HISs) continue to remain poor. To improve adoption rates, there is need to provide greater HIS experience to health professionals and informaticians in health and biomedicine during their undergraduate and graduate education. A recent review of the health professional educational curricula (i.e., medicine, nursing, allied health and health/biomedical informatics) revealed that they provide only limited exposure to EHRs. In response to this educational need, the authors have developed the University of Victoria Interdisciplinary Electronic Health Record Educational Portal (UVicIED-EHR Portal). This unique, web-based portal allows students of the health professions and practicing professionals to access and interact with a set of representative EHR HIS solutions using the web. The portal, which links to several EMRs, EPRs and PHRs, has been used by several health professional educational programs in medicine, nursing and health informatics. It provides practicing health and health/biomedical informatics professionals, for example, managers and directors, with opportunities to access and review EHR systems. The portal has been used successfully in the classroom, laboratory and with distance education to give hands-on experience with a variety of HISs and their components.

Technical and architectural issues in deploying electronic health records (EHRs) over the WWW.

In this paper technical and architectural issues are described in deploying electronic health records (EHRs) over the WWW. The project described involved deployment of EHRs that have been designed to serve in the education of health professionals and health/biomedical informaticians. In order to allow for ubiquitous access to a range of EHRs remotely an architecture was designed with three layers: (a) the "Internet" or remote user access layer (2) the "Perimeter Network", or middle firewall security and authentication layer (3) the "HINF EHR Network", consisting of the internal servers hosting EHR applications and databases. The approaches allow for a large number of remote users running a range of operating systems to access the educational EHRs from any location remotely. Virtual machine (VM) technology is employed to allow multiple versions and platforms of operating systems to be installed side-by-side on a single server. Security, technical and budgetary considerations are described as well as past and current applications of the architecture for a number of projects for the education of health professionals in the area of electronic health records.