Curating Medical and Technology Content

This article published with permission from iMedicalApps.com.

The University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) recently announced a pilot program implementing Google Glass into its medical school curriculum, along with launching a fellowship for multimedia design and education and getting students involved with Khan Academy.

Warren Wiechmann, MD MBA, current associate dean for instructional technologies and an attending physician at UC Irvine Emergency Medicine, is leading efforts to bring these tools into medical training.

Wiechmann further discussed another project to allow medical students to curate technology and medical content through a project called HealthEdIT.

What is HealthEdIT?

Warren Wiechmann: One of the things I [do] is to look into new trends and technologies. That’s my personal mission. I want to be that one step ahead. I have a very elaborate Google Alert setup, pushing to Feedly, and every day I get like 5,000 articles. I want to keep my finger on the pulse of education and healthcare and technology. But that’s another hour out of my day not doing something else.

The more I talked with students, the more they said, “Can we help you find this content?”

There’s a ton of new services out there, like Paper.li and other social media aggregators, and they’re great because they can look at the most popular links and pull them into one resource.

The problem is that even though [I] now [have] a curated list of 20 great articles, you still have to read what’s going on with them. The headline is often good enough. It helps, but not completely.

So what I want to do with students is to bring that process, but take it into one more step, and [create] Twitter-length Cliffs Notes version of articles. You can go onto the [HealthEdIT] site and see what’s new, and instead of reading the article, you can read the summaries. That way it’s interesting to you, and you get a cursory view of what’s going on in [topics such as] East Asian medicine and see the top trending things there.

So it serves a nice niche, since one of the things I’m trying to teach faculty and students is not to know everything about technology, but have a grasp of what’s going on in general without needing 2 hours out of your day to do this.

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