MedEdPORTAL
Chris Candler, MD
Co-Director and Editor, MedEdPORTAL
Director of Educational Technology,
Division of Medical Education
Association of American Medical Colleges
Robby Reynolds, MPA
Co-Director, MedEdPORTAL
Director of Educational Resources,
Division of Medical Education
Association of American Medical Colleges
Last Updated: 6 February 2006
Introduction
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has a longstanding interest in educational technologies and mechanisms that facilitate the exchange of teaching resources, particularly materials that are costly to develop. MedEdPORTAL is a new publishing venue through which faculty can publish and share such educational works. It is the only online inventory that focuses exclusively on the continuum of medical education and addresses the unique needs of medical educators. MedEdPORTAL was designed to promote collaboration and educational scholarship by facilitating the open exchange of peer-reviewed teaching resources such as tutorials, virtual patients, cases (PBL, SP, OSCE), lab manuals, assessment instruments, faculty development materials, etc. MedEdPORTAL contains information about published resources and indicates how these materials may be accessed or obtained by interested faculty.
With MedEdPORTAL, users can quickly locate information about high-quality, peer-reviewed teaching material in both the basic and clinical sciences. Teaching resources range from an audio program featuring lung-sounds that is designed to enhance student auscultation skills, to a series of videos that help residency program directors identify the first signs of fatigue in residents, to an interactive, multimedia surgical simulation showing an integrated, evidence- based framework for approaching common surgical problems. And because copyright issues are addressed during the submission process (authors retain their original copyrights and indicate how others may use them), users can download these resources worry-free of legal infringements.
Vision
The principal impetus for the creation of MedEdPORTAL was the clear advantage of having an accessible central inventory that obviates the need to duplicate valuable (and expensive to produce) resources. Why invest faculty time and effort reinventing a Web-based video tutorial of breast examination, for example, when one already exists and is referenced on MedEdPORTAL? Given competing demands on faculty time and tight budgets, having ready access to high-quality, peer-reviewed materials from a trusted source is a tremendous benefit.
Virtual Patients
This is especially true when it comes to Virtual Patients (VPs), interactive programs that simulate real-life clinical scenarios. With VPs, students can take patient histories, simulate many aspects of the physical exam, and even make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Production time can take as long as two years and can cost up to $100,000 or more. Such media-rich programs are both labor and resource-intensive to develop. Through MedEdPORTAL users can locate VPs that address a wide variety of clinical scenarios, all the way from pneumonia and obesity to Prader Willi Syndrome.
While MedEdPORTAL's VP inventory has quickly grown to over 100 scenarios, we've only begun to scratch the surface of what this technology can do for medical education. In the coming months, the AAMC will target content development in areas that are currently underrepresented in the inventory. We will also begin working with a variety of specialty organizations to promote the submission of discipline-specific materials and encourage participation of discipline-specific reviewers.
Peer Review
From its conception, MedEdPORTAL was designed to serve as a prestigious publishing venue through which faculty may disseminate their educational works. Structured like a traditional print journal, MedEdPORTAL:
- Maintains an editor and an editorial board.
- Follows a peer review policy that mirrors practices employed by established biomedical print journals.
- Employs a rigorous peer review process based on accepted standards of scholarship using invited expert reviewers to conduct all reviews.
An educational resource successfully peer-reviewed and published through MedEdPORTAL is comparable to a peer-reviewed research paper published through a reputable print-based journal and should be considered compelling scholarly contributions suitable for use to support promotion and tenure decisions.
The Future
Further, as MedEdPORTAL continues to develop, we hope it will address the needs of those medical educators who invest time, effort, and intellectual capital in the development and assessment of electronic teaching materials. With over 290 submissions from 71 U.S. and Canadian medical schools in its first year, MedEdPORTAL has already provided the opportunity for faculty members to submit creative work for formal peer review. Indeed, MedEdPORTAL's creation stemmed largely from efforts by the AAMC's Group on Educational Affairs (GEA), which wished to provide appropriate faculty recognition to encourage the development of effective electronic teaching materials.
The preliminary feedback we've received has been quite positive, with many users and groups expressing their great enthusiasm regarding the potential of such a publication outlet.
MedEdPORTAL desires to work with specialty societies (and established multimedia collections) to help them disseminate peer-reviewed educational materials. At this time, eight academic societies and special-interest groups have expressed a desire to partner with MedEdPORTAL to facilitate the dissemination of their educational materials. Partnerships such as these will promote the submission of discipline-specific materials and encourage the participation of specialist reviewers. All MedEdPORTAL content originating from a specialty organization or collection will be clearly branded on MedEdPORTAL using a logo provided by the partner organization. MedEdPORTAL works with such groups to identify Associate Editors that will facilitate MedEdPORTAL submissions, recruit reviewers, and help manage the peer review process. If you have an interest in facilitating such an arrangement please contact mededportal@aamc.org.
Additionally, the AAMC has joined the MedBiquitous Consortium, an accredited developer of information technology standards for health care education and competence assessment. The technical standards developed through MedBiquitous are designed to support the ongoing education and performance of health care learners by improving and integrating access to educational resources such as those inventoried through MedEdPORTAL.
MedEdPORTAL will be incrementally refined and enhanced during the spring of 2006. Added features will enable users to perform keyword and more complex searches, and will allow faculty members to monitor where submitted items stand in the peer-review process and identify those institutions or individuals that have accessed their resources.
A One-Stop-Shop
As MedEdPORTAL enters its second year, we hope that it will become a "one-stop shop" for locating information about high-quality, peer-reviewed educational resources. And we hope that educators will use it not only to share their own resources, but also to collaborate with others in their respective fields to continue to improve the quality of the educational resources available to our students.
