CurrMIT

This February, a staff member at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine was asked whether she could find out where informatics was taught in Vanderbilt's curriculum. A year ago, this question would have required a faculty survey to answer. But now she was able to provide details of every course in which informatics is taught at Vanderbilt in just a few minutes, thanks to CurrMIT—the AAMC's Curriculum Management and Information Tool. CurrMIT is making life easier for a lot of people these days: medical education deans, faculty members, curriculum managers, and medical education researchers, to name but a few. A comprehensive, password-protected online database designed to help medical schools manage and report on their curricula, CurrMIT is proving to be an invaluable aid in curriculum review and reform, national trend analysis, and the development of networking for course directors. Since it went live last June, 52 medical schools have invested the time and resources necessary to place detailed, session-level information about their curricula into CurrMIT. They've entered a total of about 24,000 sessions—lectures, labs, and small-group discussions—into the system. And they've learned some remarkable lessons about their own curricula. We've always know that the separate “silos” of departments and knowledge that tend to develop in medical schools mean that, unfortunately, the left hand frequently does not know what the right hand is doing. Pediatrics doesn't know what they're teaching in anatomy, and vice versa. Well, it's time they did know, and CurrMIT is making it happen. One institution, whose mission is to educate physicians to practice in rural areas and small towns, discovered that a particular disorder was being taught nearly two dozen times in the school's curriculum—even though that disorder occurs only in one half of one percent of the population, and primarily in major metropolitan areas. Before CurrMIT provided the school with the ability to look at its curriculum content in context, most people thought that their courses were the only ones teaching the subject. Conversely, nutrition, a subject everyone agreed should be integrated throughout the curriculum, was mentioned in only a few places—because everyone thought someone else was teaching it. Thanks to CurrMIT, this school and all other schools using the system can adapt their curricula to reflect an integrated, rather than a discrete and isolated, approach to learning. Think about all the uses you can make of a tool like this. When someone from the legislature calls up to say that they're thinking of passing a bill to require all state-sponsored schools to teach a certain number of hours in pain management, you can provide them with an instant report of all the places pain management and palliative care appear in your curriculum—even though a course might not have the title “Pain Management.” When the LCME calls for a curriculum self-study at your institution, instead of a paper review, you can run cross-curricular matrices and reports. And when internal and external forces prompt a curriculum review, the information is all right there—searchable, sortable, customizable. Understanding where experiences now occur in your coursework is essential to determining where they should go when you redesign the curriculum. CurrMIT isn't even two years old, but it's already adapting to meet users' needs. In response to members' feedback, we've initiated a major overhaul of the CurrMIT system, in order to take advantage of technology and tools that weren't available even as recently as 18 months ago, when we were fine-tuning the original CurrMIT. Information will get to users' screens more quickly, and reporting will be more flexible. In addition, features that users have asked for—such as a weekly calendar displaying all course sessions and relevant information—will be added. The new tools will be available in the summer, but CurrMIT will keep speeding away in the meantime. In the early 1990s, when the Internet was young, a then-new service called Prodigy promoted its online services with the tagline “You've gotta get this thing!” CurrMIT is to curriculum management today what the Internet was to information management ten years ago—a gigantic leap forward. To steal a page from Prodigy's book: “CurrMIT—you've gotta use this thing!” More information about using CurrMIT is available on the AAMC's Web site at <http://www.aamc.org/meded/curric/start.htm>, or by e-mailing <[email protected]>.