Two years later, they re issued PalmPilots for use during clinical training. Elizabeth Connor, the MUSC Library's assistant director of public services and education, explored this and other efforts to enhance medical training through information technology at the Technology Innovation in Medical Education conference held in June at Wake Forest. It was a great opportunity to learn new ways to transform the delivery of our medical curriculum, she said. Other conference hosts were the schools of medicine from Case Western University, University of California Los Angeles, and University of Pittsburgh, and Loyola University Medical Center. Students at Wake Forest use laptops in the classroom and to complete assignments.
Special ports located throughout the campus provide access to the school's network.
During their clinical rotations, at stations located in clerkship and study areas, students can place their PalmPilots in special cradles where their data is synchronized and becomes available for faculty review. Reference card information downloaded onto the PalmPilots puts medical knowledge, like normal lab values and drug references, right at students' fingertips. Before we obligate our students to the cost of computers, we have to make sure they have information to access, connections that are reliable and an effective support system, said Victor Del Bene, M.D., associate dean for students. One of our next steps is to get all syllabi online in a format that's interactive and searchable, he continued. During the conference, Connor had the opportunity to demonstrate some of MUSC's efforts to integrate information technology Edweb and Human Anatomy Online.