Health Information Technology Evaluation and Education: Finding Our Way

pioned as a way to improve and expand patient com-munication with the health care team, reduce medical errors, create disease registries, improve provider coordination, empower self-management behaviors, and improve both the quality and efficiency of care.1-12 However, as family medicine educators, we must con-sider two important questions. Is health IT delivering what it promises for practice improvement? And how well are we educating our learners about the use of health IT innovations? This issue of Family Medicine is dedicated to re-search about health IT. It explores the perils, pitfalls, and triumphs associated with health IT implementa-tion and with teaching our learners to use new health IT tools. We are exploring new territory as we learn about and use health IT innovations. However, many of these new technologies are understudied and can lead to unintended consequences.13 We need to guide oth-ers into these new frontiers, while maintaining family medicine’s core values. Health IT has certainly been heralded as a way to improve communication between the patient and the health care team. Two of this issue’s articles focus on teaching residents and medical students to communi-cate electronically with their patients. Heather Paladine, MD, and her colleagues tackled the problem of teach-ing resident physicians best practices for electronic communication with their patients. They developed a novel curriculum on electronic communication and distributed it online using the STFM Resource Library (www.fmdrl.org). They report the results of their pretest and posttest assessments of resident and faculty physi-cians at 16 family medicine residencies. Amber Barnhart, MD, and colleagues also tackled the problem of teaching best practices for electronic communication with patients but at the medical stu-dent level. They also developed a curriculum based on best practice guidelines. They sent weekly mock patient e-mails to medical students and graded their responses. They describe the curriculum and result