UT Austin Medical School Case Study
NOVEL ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS SYSTEM
training for students & research for faculty
Client
Dell Medical School, University of Texas | Austin, TX
Category
Education
Overview
In 2016 the University of Texas opened the Dell Medical School, providing students with a leading-edge curriculum to focus on improving health locally and a bold vision for accelerating research. UT’s own Health Informatics and Information Technology (HIHIT) Program, an ideal “in-house” partner, began consulting on how electronic health record systems may be modified to aid in learning and help professors research best teaching practices
Business Requirement
As part of its mission to provide medical students with a curriculum that prepares them for real-world experience, faculty at the Dell Medical School saw the importance of providing early exposure to Electronic Health Records (EHR), which are generally not part of their initial training. The medical school contacted the Health Informatics Department within the University’s McCombs School of Business to create a custom EHR system that the medical students could use in their training. HIHIT, however, had no developers at their disposal and created a public bidding process which MAVA Partners won.
THE MAVA PARTNERS SOLUTION
Side by side with Prof. Ligon of the HIHIT program, MAVA Partners was able to fully customize a publicly available open-source electronic records platform into a robust, integrated system that lets medical students work with EHR from the get-go. This early exposure gives students a head-start at “nuts and bolts” care delivery processes before they serve in clinical rotations, getting them up the learning curve quicker when they get to real patient care. Professors also found that they could evaluate teaching methodologies by varying their assignments in the EHR system.