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| 2003 Progress Report |
| Overview |
The Office of Medical Informatics (OMI) was created by the Dean in 1990 to enhance the medical education and patient care missions of the College of Medicine. For more than twelve years our office has endeavored to develop appropriate and cost-effective information technologies. In 1998 OMI became part of the College of Medicine Chapman Education Center (COMCEC) and refocused solely on medical education at all levels (undergraduate, resident, and continuing). Our office works in four primary areas:
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Major Goal |
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High Stakes Testing In late 2002 we developed the eXtensible Assessment Machine (XAM) to address our need for more sophisticated test delivery and control. This program is Internet standards based and will run on almost any networked computer. XAM provides our students and faculty with a robust and secure environment for high stakes testing. It is far superior to the commercial software packages (Blackboard, WebCT) available on campus. A sample screen appears below:
Evaluation Tools We have been evaluating programs, faculty, and students online since 1996. We continue to develop and improve what has become known as the Evaluation Software Suite (EvalSuite). The major components include:
Testing Center For the past three years we have developed online testing facilities to better serve our students. The Testing Center is a dedicated room with 75 computer testing stations. It is used extensively by the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, and Nursing. For medical students we augment this with up to 45 additional temporary seats in an adjacent room. This allows us to test up to 120 students in one sitting.
Use of the Testing Center has grown over the past three years, logging more than 200 individual events for nearly 34,000 student hours from August 2002 to June 2003. Students benefit from a quiet, secure environment to take their important exams. Faculty and proctors benefit from enhanced monitoring and statistical reports. The Health Center benefits from the decreased demand on traditional classrooms.
Calendars The medical curriculum is complex and difficult to manage. For years we had been using paper schedules that conflicted with each other and quickly went out of date. In the fall of 2002, we deployed a Web-based calendar system called eCal. Features include: day/week/month views, automatic color coding of disciplines, hypertext links to course materials, email schedule requests, optional weekly digest sent by email every Sunday, and export for use with handheld computers.
Directories The directory services provided by the main campus are very limited. There is no standardized way for an instructor to get a photo roster of students enrolled in their class. Over the past two years we developed a successful online directory (dirCGI). This program provides secure access to student and faculty photographs and contact information (sample below has been purposely blurred to protect identities).
Online Instruction Over the past two years our staff has created 74 Grand Rounds Online modules in cooperation with Shands Healthcare. We have created an additional 29 modules for the History of Medicine program. We have also facilitated the creation of over 70 more online lecture/slide modules in various areas. The Medical Informatics server (medinfo.ufl.edu) contains more than six gigabytes of information and receives over 20 million hits per year. It is one of the most popular sites on the UF campus. We host Web-based materials for the majority of courses taught in the College. In addition, we have created more than 20 sites for other College programs and recently took over maintenance of the main college Web pages (www.med.ufl.edu). Other Services
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| Goals for the Next Two Years |
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| Updated 06/05/03 :: http://medinfo.ufl.edu/omi/docs/report03/ |
