Just in time: technology to disseminate curriculum and manage educational requirements with mobile technology

Learning objectives intended to guide clinical education may be of limited usefulness if they are unavailable to students when interacting with patients.

We developed, implemented, and evaluated a Web-based process to disseminate the Clerkship Directors of Internal Medicine curricular objectives to students via handheld computers and for students to upload patient logs to a central database.

We delivered this program to all students in our geographically dispersed system, with minimal technological problems. The total number of "hits" on curricular objectives was 8,932 (averaging 149 per student or approximately 2.7 times daily). The average number of "hits" per problem was 470, ranging from 18 for smoking cessation to 1,784 for chest pain. The total number of patient problems logged by students was 9,579, and 91% of students met our prespecified criteria for numbers and types of patients.

Dissemination and use of curricular learning objectives and related tools is enhanced with mobile technology.