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Medical School Database Connects Classroom to Clinic
6/28/2001
A unique database for medical students and other health sciences students has been developed at Tufts University to enrich teaching and learning. The database, aptly called the Health Sciences Database, recently won the Enterprise Value Award from CIO magazine. This award recognizes the merits of cutting-edge hardware or software solutions.
The Tufts HSDB is a Web-accessible multimedia collection of lecture notes, images, journal articles, course syllabi, and pedagogical tools. Its value, however, lies not just in the wealth of information stored in the database, but in the cross-disciplinary nature of the collection as well as in the way data are organized and accessed.
The HSDB had its start six years ago, when a small team of people working in Tufts' Medical School library began brainstorming ways to better provide slide images to students. Until then two sets had been kept on reserve in the library, an obviously inadequate solution, especially at exam time. The team reasoned that an image database would allow more students to access the slides they needed for certain courses. Since then, with the help of a grant from the National Library of Medicine, the HSDB has grown to encompass a vast collection of resources. From image banking, the team went on to add course syllabi for nearly the entire medical school curriculum. These syllabi, which more closely resemble textbooks than the typical undergraduate course outline, provide medical students with crucial instructional materials in a searchable, manageable format. The database also includes interactive quizzes, tutorials, and innovative teaching tools created by faculty members, as well as illustrations and images pulled in from the Web. Additionally, it now includes material from most of the other professional schools in the Health Sciences Center.
Although the HSDB is called a database, it more closely resembles a portal. Users are given a unique ID tag and enter the site through a home page that links to course syllabi for nearly every medical school course. According to Paul Wang, Chair of the Curriculum Committee for the medical school, one of the strengths of the database is its versatility. "Students can use it as an image database and to catch up on lecture material," he says, "But they also can use it to keep notes." A function built into the programming allows a user to customize a version of the database with notes. Because of the system's unique log-on capabilities, any notations a person makes in the material appear exactly as they were inserted, every time the person logs on.
Wang also points out how useful the database is in linking the first two (classroom-based) years of medical school with the last two (clinical) years. "It's a big challenge trying to bring the classroom experience and the clinic experience together," he says. "Every medical student accumulates a mountain of books and notes. It's not practical to carry that around with you during clinical rotations, and it's not searchable. The database is one solution that allows students to easily draw on the knowledge they gained in lecture." Students can simply search the database for material on a topic they're addressing in clinic. This "anytime, anywhere access," says Bruce Metz, the university's vice president of Information Technology, is a major benefit of the technology tool. Wireless access, in the planning stages, will make that even simpler.
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