From prototype to production: lessons learned from the evolution of an EHR educational portal

The use of electronic health records is rapidly increasing. However, the integration of this technology into the education of health professionals and health informaticians has largely remained to be explored. In this paper we describe an approach to providing remote access to electronic health records for use in health professional and health informatics education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The University of Victoria EHR Educational Portal was designed by the authors to allow for remote Web-based access by students to a range of systems hosted on the portal. Architectural considerations and the evolution of the portal structure from prototype to production system are described. The paper also describes our initial applications of the approach in integrating EHRs into nursing, medical and health informatics educational programs.