Sharing innovation: the case for technology standards in health professions education

Abstract

Information technologies have provided fertile ground for innovation in healthcare education, but too often these innovations have been limited in scope and impact. One way of addressing these limitations is the development of common and open technology standards to scale innovation across organizational boundaries. Research on the diffusion of standards indicates that environmental forces, such as regulatory changes, top-down management support, and feasibility are key determinants of standards adoption. This paper describes the perspective and work of MedBiquitous, the only internationally recognized standards body in healthcare education. Many innovators are implementing MedBiquitous healthcare education standards to effect change within and across organizations. In a resource-constrained and knowledge intensive domain such as healthcare education, collaboration is an imperative. Technology standards are essential to raise the quality of healthcare education and assessment in a cost-effective manner.

Virtual patients: a critical literature review and proposed next steps

“…This aspect will make the tool unviable as the number of users grows. Fortunately, groups such as the MedBiquitous consortium (http://www.medbiq.org) are working to facilitate the sharing of VPs across institutions 64 and measured successes have already been realised However, it is important to reproduce not only the technical features of the VP, but also the key elements of instructional design and curricular integration.…”

Medical education practice-based research networks: Facilitating collaborative research

“…Perhaps most importantly, the NON can promulgate specifications, standards, and practices for intellectual property and data sharing, such as those now emerging from Medbiquitous (Smothers et al. 2008 ) and Data Commons, LLC ( 2013 ; a partnership of the Federation of State Medical Boards, National Board of Medical Examiners, Association of American Medical Colleges, Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, American Board of Family Medicine, and American Board of Pediatrics). The NON might itself be organized as a member organization, with each member network contributing a membership fee to support periodic NON conference calls and meetings.…”

e-Portfolio Competency Metadata: Pilot Study for a Call to Action

“…In GME, no standardized method exists to share important performance data between residencies and institutions. The MedBiquitous consortium has diligently aimed to create technology standards in the domains of professional certification, health care competencies and learning, medical education metrics, and professional networking based on existing organizational XML standards such as the World Wide Web Consortium, HL7, and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative [11,12,16]. Their work has been adopted by the ABMS to collect certification data from members.…”

“…Little information exists on metadata within the realm of resident education, particularly in the context of the ACGME criteria [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Studies have primarily focused on metadatadriven experiences in electronic patient health records, clinical studies, public health and epidemiology, and even allied health education.…”