Development of a Case Study-Based Approach for Effective Understanding and use of EHRs in Undergraduate Multidisciplinary Education

Abstract

The notion of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and healthcare Information Technologies (HITs) have recently been adopted by many countries. EHRs facilitate sharing of patients' data among healthcare providers, improve patient safety, and reduce healthcare delivery costs. However, many healthcare providers are unable to use EHRs and related HITs, as they lake the competencies and skills necessary to use them. To overcome this gap, many initiatives have proposed, in different countries, on one hand to train healthcare providers to effectively use EHRs and on another to integrate the required EHR competencies and skills with undergraduate curricula. HiCure is a European Erasmus+ project that aims to develop competency-based health informatics pathways that can be integrated within undergraduate curricula of IT and healthcare programs. This paper presents a case study-based approach, developed in HiCure, to instill the required skills for more applied effective understanding and use of EHRs in undergraduate multidisciplinary education. It utilises real-life EHR notion and its corresponding HITs, exposes students to real-life situations, for more effective comprehension of related uses, issues, intricacies and challenges for improved educational learning outcomes.