Sharing Is Caring: Helping Institutions and Health Organizations Leverage Data for Educational Improvement

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Data Science
• Health Informatics

Background:

• Competency-based medical education (CBME) generates extensive data valuable for understanding trainees and educational systems.
• Organizations face significant hurdles in accessing, governing, analyzing, and visualizing clinical and educational data.
• These challenges impede essential data sharing, hindering system-wide improvements in medical education.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify and illustrate challenges in medical education data sharing.
• To characterize the complexity of data sharing across organizational and data type dimensions.
• To introduce a practical blueprint for facilitating data sharing initiatives.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of four case studies to highlight data sharing challenges.
• Characterization of data sharing complexity based on organizational scope (single vs. multiple) and data type (clinical/educational).
• Development of an action-oriented, evidence-informed blueprint for data sharing.

Main Results:

• Data sharing in medical education is complex, influenced by legislative variability, data policies, heterogeneity, infrastructure, and diverse use cases.
• Case studies demonstrated challenges in both single- and multi-organizational contexts, involving clinical and educational data.
• A three-stage blueprint (preparation, execution, iteration) was developed to guide data sharing.

Conclusions:

• Effective data sharing is crucial for advancing medical education but faces numerous obstacles.
• The proposed blueprint provides a structured approach to support and guide data sharing initiatives.
• This model can help organizations navigate and improve their data sharing processes internally and collaboratively.