The teaching of medical informatics to medical students including a retrospective evaluation

It is commonly suggested that (i) Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is essential for the delivery of quality healthcare [17], and (ii) the role of doctors is crucial in the implementation of ICT-based systems in hospitals and in general practice. Based on these two premises, this paper argues for a medical informatics course for medical students. The paper outlines the content of a one-semester elective in medical informatics that was presented over eight academic years. The course pre-dates the recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association, IMIA [7]. Nevertheless, it is compatible with the recommendations of IMIA and also with the earlier findings of the EDUCTRA study [5]. The principles formulated in this paper are presented in order to help other educationalists (i) to obtain insights and (ii) thence to assist them to engineer medical informatics changes into their medical school environments. Each time that the course was presented, participants were asked for their evaluation of the course [9]. These views were favourable. It was thought that a follow-up survey of these same respondents - now practising doctors, some of whom took the course 10 years ago - might give further insights into the relevance and value of this course. The views of these practising doctors are presented within the paper