Are students ready for meaningful use?

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Health Informatics
• Electronic Health Records

Background:

• Meaningful Use (MU) implementation involves three stages for electronic medical records (EMRs).
• Stage one MU objectives focus on structured data analysis, decision support (e.g., drug-drug interaction checks), and electronic information exchange.

Purpose of the Study:

• Assess medical student performance on 10 stage-one MU tasks.
• Correlate MU performance with end-of-clerkship professionalism and objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) grades.

Main Methods:

• Two hundred twenty-two third-year medical students completed 15 online MU tutorials.
• Student MU documentation and performance were evaluated in a virtual patient EMR, measuring tasks like adding problems, medications, and performing DDI checks.

Main Results:

• 130 MU errors were identified among 68 students; 90% were data entry errors.
• Common errors included structured data entry, medication details, DDI identification, smoking status, and colonoscopy results.
• MU errors correlated with lower professionalism (r=-0.112, p=0.048) and OSCE scores for history-taking (r=-0.165, p=0.008) and communication (r=-0.173, p=0.006).

Conclusions:

• Medical student errors in MU tasks are prevalent.
• These errors are linked to poorer performance in professionalism and clinical skills assessments.
• Without assessment and feedback, many students may not be prepared for advanced MU functionalities.