Abstract:

Introduction:
The National Health Service (NHS) in England has undergone digital transformation to improve services and facilitate communication between healthcare professionals and patients. Learning to use an electronic health record (EHR) can be daunting for users and is a skill that needs to be embedded into undergraduate education. Our healthcare graduates need to be able to navigate this digital environment from the beginning of their professional practice and demonstrate key competencies when using the EHR, to deliver optimal patient care and reduce medical errors.

Methods:
We developed EHR Essentials, an online learning package to be used for inter-professional teaching across our medical, nursing, pharmacy and midwifery undergraduate programmes. Our interdisciplinary working group included clinical academics from these professions, as well as a patient representative, computer scientist, digital health scientists and learning technologists. The group co-designed EHR Essentials to help students develop the basic skills needed to align with a digital competency framework outlining the intended learning objectives. The resource contains videos, quizzes and patient insights. Students participate in interactive exercises allowing them to watch and document a patient interaction, consider communication with a multidisciplinary team and understand the patient journey through different healthcare contexts.

Results:
EHR Essentials has been designed to teach transferable digital skills and principles of good practice rather than system-specific knowledge. The prototype has been created with an aim to introduce it into curricula; student feedback and evaluation is in progress to refine the final resource.

Conclusion:
This work reflects an exciting and evolving area within healthcare education. Next steps will be to embed the package in the wider pedagogy with synchronous learning sessions planned to include simulation. Integrating the work into undergraduate curricula will help equip students with the digital skills needed upon graduation, leading to a positive impact on patient care.

Keywords:

Undergraduate healthcare education, digital healthcare, e-learning, curricula development.