Developing an Interactive Approach in Teaching Medical Informatics

A new masters program in medical informatics is proposed for development at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Timisoara. Given the rapidly changing technology itself and its deployment in biomedical science, the master's program curriculum has to be multidisciplinary, comprehensive and coherent in conveying the concepts, as well as the interdisciplinary character, of medical informatics (MI). We describe the rationale and methods for a pilot study to develop a new, interactive approach in teaching MI. The study is being conducted within the existing MI course offered for the medical students in order to evaluate its impact on instruction and determine if a larger scale design is feasible. Two teaching teams of four instructors have been assigned to one of two tracks in our pilot study: traditional instruction or interactive instruction. After one term we have gained important information about how the structural and instructional aspects of the pilot design may influence confidence and attitudes.