Available medical equipment has become more complicated over the years.
Recent advances in medicine have improved the amount of knowledge that medical students can learn. This means that some medical schools are expanding their curricula to handle these new tools for physicians. Certain approaches are being installed around the United States to use new technologies, with the ultimate goal of encouraging medical students to gain familiarity with the skills of the future.
University of Central Florida Medical School
The University of Central Florida Medical School created a program in 2010 that allows all students to be paired up with a "virtual patient" at the start of the four-year medical school tenure. The student will learn from the computer-based "virtual patient" as it gets ill and recovers throughout the coursework. Students are instructed to treat these avatars from birth to death, with a lifetime of challenging diagnoses in the middle. The avatar can change races and sexes as well, which lets the students handle a wide array of diseases.
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University's medical school has existed for over a century, but in 2006 it decided to make better use of high-tech study materials, and shifted toward the development of an academic electronic health record. This record gives students access to information on thousands of patients from various mobile devices, and connects all this data with classroom information to let students refer to topics they've encountered with actual patients.
Southern Illinois University
Southern Illinois University was an early leader in becoming a high-tech medical school, transforming its curriculum about 10 years ago to offer what it calls a "hybrid" learning experience. This strategy combines computerized simulations with real patients to aid students in learning diagnosis and treatment. This is intended to allow students to gain a broad knowledge of medicine, instead of memorizing certain specific details about individual case studies.
The School of Medicine at University of California San Francisco
The School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, started in 2010 to use an electronic system of portfolios to provide assistance to students to assess their own progress in completing medical competencies. Students in the UCSF program maintain their progress by collecting data points and their own analysis into individualized profiles. Professors are then able to review these student portfolios to decide if the pupils can advance to the next level of medical school.
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