Computer-Assisted Medical Education: Current and Potential Roles

Medical education remains a time-consuming and complex task whose goals are to provide students with sufficient factual information and the clinical reasoning tools to ensure the competency of its graduates. Today, this task is especially challenging because of the exponential growth in biomedical information and the ever-increasing time pressure placed upon medical educators. Electronic tools have the capacity to facilitate medical education, as well as to fundamentally improve our ability to ensure the competency of our graduates. This article reviews some of the approaches to electronic education developed at the University of Chicago.