Integrating digital health into medical education

I commend Drs Rajaram, Moore, and Mamdani on their excellent article about the challenges in preparing family medicine residents to practise in the digital era.¹

Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded not-for-profit organization, has been engaged in influencing change in the education of Canada’s next generation of clinicians since 2011. It partnered with 3 national organizations—the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN), and the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada (AFPC)—with a goal of encouraging health informatics education for clinicians in training.

The partnership with the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada yielded the following:

• creation of a prototype online tool kit of health informatics resources for medical educators, still in development (www.ehealthresources.ca);

• development of national e-health competencies for undergraduate medical education (https://www.ehealthresources.ca/en/articles/4);

• influence on the CanMEDS 2015 framework² through the involvement of Canada Health Infoway’s leadership committee, led by Dr Kendall Ho;

• production of a series of continuing medical education–accredited webinars on digital health, which are also available through www.ehealthresources.ca; and

• publication of a chapter in the health informatics textbook by Shachak et al, Health Professionals’ Education in the Age of Clinical Information Systems, Mobile Computing and Social Networks.³

The partnerships with AFPC and CASN also produced robust health informatics resources:

• the e-Learning for Healthcare Professionals resource with AFPC (http://elearnhcp.ca) and

• the Entry-to-Practice Nursing Informatics Competencies and Nursing Informatics Teaching Toolkit with CASN (https://www.casn.ca/education/digital-healthnursing-informatics-casn-infoway-nurses-training-project).

The broader work with all 3 organizations morphed into a faculty peer network program, eventually named the Digital Health Faculty Associations Content and Training Solutions program, which strove to provide faculty (ie, medical, nursing, and pharmacy educators) with the tools and resources to integrate health informatics into their teachings. This program received the 2017 Ted Freeman Award for Innovation in Education, and was recently showcased at the eHealth 2019 conference by my colleague Anne Fazzalari.

Most recently, Canada Health Infoway partnered with the College of Family Physicians of Canada to produce a Best Advice guide on electronic medical records, written by family physician experts from across Canada.⁴ The authors of this commentary might have a particular interest in this guide, which is intended to be a practical overview of electronic medical records for busy family physicians. It includes, for example, a module on quality improvement by Dr Alex Singer.

Despite the aforementioned efforts, the integration of health informatics concepts into the curricula of Canadian medical schools and residencies is proceeding slowly. As the authors point out, there is a need to educate family medicine residents in the realm of health informatics, applied data analytics for continuous quality improvement, and general principles of digital health technologies. Hopefully the resources noted above are of interest. The next generation of family physicians will likely be the most digitally savvy to date. Tailored educational resources and tools can support this generation in using technology optimally and safely to benefit their patients and enhance the clinician experience.

I wish the authors good luck in their pursuit of this endeavour, and look forward to connecting with them in the future.

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