gms | German Medical Science

Background: Successful digital transformation in health requires expertise in Medical Informatics in all stakeholder groups [1]. Most of the skills needed are rooted in Medical Informatics (MI) curricula, which have already proven to teach necessary essentials for the digital transformation [1]. Cuurrently, professionals skilled in MI are not sufficiently available [2]. To overcome this lack, it is crucial to teach students and also professionals in vocational training [3]. As an efficient and sustainable means, partners of the Medical Informatics Initiative [3] consortium “HiGHmed” are developing the “HiGHmeducation” program. It enables learners to participate in established MI curricula via cross-institutional training modules. In this way, specific teaching expertise at one site can reach participants from all sites. Thus, the spectrum of available content increases for all learners. To enable cross-institutional participation, e-learning methods are used.

Goals of the project include:

1.

Broaden spectrum of available MI courses at all partner sites

2.

Open MI courses for healthcare professionals

3.

Implement a short-term solution for the lack of MI-skilled professionals

4.

Develop a governance infrastructure to create a long-term cooperation

Background: HiGHmeducation develops courses in innovative online teaching formats to enable remote participation [4], [5]. For this, internal training on e-learning didactics were carried out. HiGHmeducation courses are tailored towards interdisciplinary learning with students of heterogeneous backgrounds and different healthcare professionals. To further optimize the novel teaching approach, modules were offered first locally at each site. Quality was systematically assessed, using the established community of inquiry instrument by Arbaugh et al. [6], [7].

Results: Eleven universities and one healthcare start-up have begun implementing the HiGHmeducation program. Since project start in 2018, a didactic strategy for online courses has been consented [8]; thematically distinct courses have been taught at 8 sites for the first time in the winter term 2019/2020, reaching a total of 96 students from medicine, MI, biomedical engineering, and medical information management. The expertise of the academic partners was enriched by practical training with state-of-the-art systems by the start-up. The feedback is currently used to optimize the modules, before they are offered inter-institutionally.

Conclusion: Transforming established MI courses into innovative online courses is a promising approach to use existing resources efficiently. Quality and sustainability of the courses is implemented by design, since all courses are part of quality controlled higher education curricula. Additionally, the modules' quality is monitored within HiGHmeducation using a standardized instrument. Therefore, it offers an immediately available solution for the short-term demand of MI-skilled professionals. Nevertheless, sustainability of HiGHmeducation beyond the MII is a challenge we will address in the next future.

Inter-institutional course participation will be offered in 2020's winter term. Courses are open for learners from all partner institutions. The participants of heterogeneous backgrounds will allow for interdisciplinary learning experiences that are in line with latest calls for lifelong learning measures [9], [10]. Prospectively, participation in courses will be rewarded with certificates, making the acquired skills more visible and the HiGHmeducation program even more attractive.

Members of the HiGHmeducation Consortium can be found at https://education.highmed.org/network/, Germany.

Acknowledgements: This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 01ZZ1802A.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.