AAMC Southern Group on Educational Affairs Special Interest Group

Computers in Medical Education#index.html

Minutes of the group's meeting held in Gainesville, FL on March 29, 1996

1. The group had a very strong bias towards "Information Technology in Medical Education" for the name of the SIG.
2. With regard to the AAMC Educational Resource Database, there were several points raised that should be considered:
   • How will the database relate to existing directories and databases? Other sites mentioned were the University of Michigan and the NLM AVLINE.
   • Does the AAMC initiative represent duplication of effort?
   • Several members of our group expressed interest in the potential for peer review, especially as it relates to promotion and tenure. Could the reviews contained within the AAMC database serve this purpose?
3. With regard to the AAMC World Wide Web initiative, a major issue is the interface between the central AAMC web pages and materials maintained by remote individuals and institutions. For example, will all the materials for the special interest groups be maintained at the AAMC or will there be a network of links to the various member sites? The experience of the American Medical Informatics Association may be illustrative. AMIA maintains web pages for each of its working groups at the central AMIA office. Pointers from these pages lead to the bulk of the working group documents which are distributed across many institutions and sites. Finally, our group thought it was important that the AAMC provide a web presence for groups such as the resident education SIG that may not have the ability to create their own web pages.
4. We decided to start several initiatives for the SGEA SIG:
   • We will create a World Wide Web page containing the names, institutions and email addresses of the SIG membership.
   • We will create a page with links to various "public" internet resources of interest to undergraduate medical education.
   • We identified a small group of individuals who are willing to volunteer to prepare a program for the AAMC meeting in the fall.
5. We also discussed the development of a shared online curriculum in medical informatics which would be available to medical students, residents, and practicing physicians. As part of this discussion, we created a table of comparative information on existing programs and approaches which will be posted on the World Wide Web.