Teaching epidemiology and biostatistics through interactive problem solving

Medical education should prepare students for the reasoning and decision making that are required in a physician's clinical work. The disciplines of epidemiology and biostatistics, as combined in clinical epidemiology, lend themselves very well to this purpose. A lecture course in epidemiology and biostatistics was redesigned to emphasize interactive learning through problem-solving workshops in which students worked with actual data from two epidemiologic studies. A third workshop provided experience in the critical appraisal of an epidemiologic study from the current literature. Students respond favorably to these active learning experiences, which deal with relevant contemporary health problems. The concepts of clinical epidemiology should be integrated into clinical teaching in all stages of training.