Marian University College of Medicine, 3200 Cold Spring Rd., Indianapolis, IN, 36032, USA.
Department of Biological Sciences, Marian University, College of Osteopathic Medicine, 3200 Cold Spring Rd, Indianapolis, IN, 46222, USA.
BMC Med Educ. 2018 Mar 2;18(1):31. doi: 10.1186/s12909-018-1136-z.
Medical school curricula strives to teach as much material as can be retained in a limited amount of time. A common "gold standard" resource used building curricula are medical objectives suggested by national societies. Unfortunately these objectives suffer from several functional limitations such as limited accessibility to society members, non-searchable formats (such as nested tables or pdf images), and inability to compare and search across societal objectives for redundancy or gaps. The shift towards integrated curriculums in medical school also highlights the need to access suggested content across classical discipline categories.
We have codified recommendations from national societies in the United States for medical school objectives in a common tabular format and developed an open access database which can be searched across disciplines and societies. A front end website that allows for searching objectives by keyword while filtering on society or discipline was created. The objectives returned from the initial search can be subsearched by a second term. There is a large range in the format, age, breadth, quantity, and quality of objectives from different societies. Some unique disciplines have overlapping suggested content though most of the content does seem "binnable" by discipline. The choice of metadata for objectives from each given society was also very inconsistent.
A free and searchable database of medical content to deliver during medical school has been developed with over 13,000 objectives from 18 societies and 22 disciplines at http://data.medobjectives.marian.edu/ . The normalization of the different disciplines' objectives into a common database allows a platform to standardize objectives moving forward. Future work could include adding user accounts to access the database, submission of new objectives, voting up and down suggested objectives, and adding "answers" mapped to objectives. Keyword tagging could allow import of content (e.g. PowerPoints) and outputting of suggested objectives, which would also allow comparison of curriculum across medical schools.
医学院课程旨在在有限的时间内教授尽可能多的材料。构建课程常用的一个“黄金标准”资源是来自国家学会的医学目标。遗憾的是，这些目标存在几个功能限制，例如成员对目标的有限访问、不可搜索的格式（如嵌套表格或 PDF 图像），以及无法比较和搜索各个学会的目标，以发现冗余或空白。医学院课程向综合课程的转变也凸显了需要跨经典学科类别获取建议内容。
我们以常见的表格格式对美国国家学会的建议进行了编码，并开发了一个开放获取的数据库，该数据库可跨学科和学会进行搜索。创建了一个前端网站，该网站允许通过关键字搜索目标，同时可按学会或学科进行过滤。从初始搜索返回的目标可以通过第二个术语进行再次搜索。不同学会的目标在格式、年龄、广度、数量和质量上存在很大差异。一些独特的学科有重叠的建议内容，尽管大部分内容似乎可以按学科“分类”。来自每个给定学会的目标的元数据选择也非常不一致。
在 http://data.medobjectives.marian.edu/ 上开发了一个免费且可搜索的医学内容数据库，其中包含来自 18 个学会和 22 个学科的 13000 多个目标。将不同学科的目标标准化到一个共同的数据库中，为未来的标准化目标提供了一个平台。未来的工作可以包括添加用户账户以访问数据库、提交新目标、对建议目标进行上下投票，以及添加映射到目标的“答案”。关键字标记可以允许导入内容（例如，PowerPoint）并输出建议目标，这也将允许比较不同医学院的课程。
