gms | German Medical Science

The German Federal Regulation for the Education of Medical Students in its newest edition for the first time made medical informatics a compulsory subject within the medical curriculum. The reactions of the known German institutes of medical informatics to this newly arisen situation where determined by an extensive web-search. As far as possible from the information presented, teaching content and topics as well as the placement of the courses with regard to the sequence of the whole educational process was documented.

First a list of all German academic medical schools (resp. universities) was collected. This was done by consulting a website of the German federal commission for education planning und research funding, which addresses prospective students (http://www.studienwahl.de/). Searching for "medicine" as a study subject resulted in a list of 37 institutions that was then hand filtered for actual universities with medical faculties.

The homepages of the identified faculties were then searched for information on any effects of the educational regulations, which could usually be found either on the pages concerned with studies and education.

A second list of institutes of medical informatics was constructed, that comprised only institutes directly situated inside a medical faculty or in close cooperation with a medical faculty. Some existing "Internet-address-lists" of institutes of medical informatics were very helpful in this step; they are mentioned under the "literature"-heading at the end of this text. The homepages of all identified institutes of medical informatics affiliated to a medical faculty were then searched for information regarding the new curriculum of medical informatics.

The results of the search were then categorized and listed in tabular form.

If found, topical content of any already implemented or planned courses was entered into the table in short, catchword-like form.

Our web search generally found a lack of information regarding the effects of the new study regulations on medical informatics education as part of the reformed medical curriculum on the homepages of the institutes of medical informatics who were most directly affected by the new situation.

We plan to give an updated presentation of our findings on the day of the GMDS-annual meeting in Innsbruck, in order to present listeners there with an up-to-date picture of the situation. Regarding the situation as presented on the medical institutes' websites at the moment, it has to be stated that there is no sign of any discussion of either topical content for such a new curriculum, or of any reflections regarding the optimal placement of the a medical informatics course within the educational medical courses sequence.

Institutes and departments of medical informatics affiliated to medical faculties have to adapt to their new role as compulsory teachers. A discussion of topical contents and curricular structures and processes with regard to a desirable and optimal integration into the whole course of medical education seems to be overdue.

Building on our own experience and discussions during the implementation of the Hannover Curriculum "HannibaL" (Hannover integrated professional adaptive curriculum) the Institute of Medical Informatics at Hannover Medical School developed a possible solution for an integrated curriculum by placing the emphasis on the teaching of "evidence based medicine". We suggest this model as a basis for discussion.