Following a change in Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services policy in the last decade, medical students now often use the electronic health record (EHR) for patient documentation, and their teachers verify what they have done. With that change, the door has been opened for medical students to have greater responsibility in the EHR during their clerkships.
The AMA EHR Workflow Learning Series helps medical students leverage the EHR to improve their efficiency and effectiveness as they gain increasing responsibility in a variety of health care settings. The vendor-agnostic, AMA members-only series is structured around the typical prerounding activities of medical students during clerkships.
The AMA EHR Learning Workforce Series is part of the AMA Ed Hub™, an online learning platform that brings together high-quality CME, maintenance of certification, and educational content from trusted sources, all in one place—with activities relevant to you, automated credit tracking, and reporting for some states and specialty boards.
One of the microlearning courses, for example, takes medical students “inside the patient chart,” noting that it “acts as a comprehensive record of the patient's current status and past medical history.”
The patient chart in the EHR “is bursting with all types of information,” including “laboratory values, vital signs, notes, imaging results, medication records and a whole lot more—all being updated continuously.”
“The amount of data needing to be reviewed can feel overwhelming in the short time you have during prerounding for each patient,” the module says, before outlining tips to help medical students:
- Grasp the major categories data in the EHR.
- Find data in different ways to support prerounding and other activities.
- Recognize the difference between structured and unstructured data, and the implications for information retrieval.
- Identify and manage “chart lore.”
With the AMA EHR Workflow Learning Series, medical students will also learn to:
- Collect and prioritize their patients.
- Use the EHR configuration.
- Improve efficiency with EHR dashboards.
- Understand alerts, warnings and AI.
- Use a note template.
- Deal with missing data.
That final module on missing data notes that there will be times when prerounding “has come to a complete standstill” because of information in the EHR that looks suspicious, inaccurate or “or just plain missing.” The module helps medical students “figure out how to investigate instances of missing or suspicious data.”
The AMA EHR Workflow Learning Series is part of the AMA UME Curricular Enrichment Program, which enables medical educators to assign specific elements and receive reports on medical student progress, track via a dashboard, send reminder emails and customize reporting options. Request a demo.
