How technology is bridging gap in pre-medical education and preparation

The ever-changing state of technology in every sphere is forcing stakeholders to stay up-to-date and take appropriate measures to upgrade themselves. Medical education and healthcare are no such exceptions. The medical education landscape is drastically changing due to a variety of factors, including the changing health care environment, changes in the role of the physician, societal expectations, and changes in medical science.

Approximately 600,000 articles are published each year in biomedical literature. A conscientious student who reads two articles per day would be more than 800 years behind in 1 year if they attempted to keep up with the literature. Despite the profession's long-held belief that physicians should learn continuously, this concept is now imperative. In addition, there is a new generation of learners - "the digital natives.". These are the young people born into the digital world who have mastered the language of technology. They are used to technology-enhanced learning environments and expect their education to reflect their expertise in different levels of technology integration. However, medicine is experiencing a rapid change in bridging the gap in medical education and its preparation. 

Understanding the emergent technology in medical education

Technology is used in medical education in order to facilitate basic knowledge acquisition, improve decision making, enhance perceptual variation, improve coordination skills, train for rare or critical events, and improve psychomotor skills. These goals can be addressed with different technologies. To transform learning into a collaborative, personalized, and empowering experience, it is the responsibility of medical educators to implement these new technologies effectively.

It has been seen that emergent technology has the power to transform the future provision of higher education. The two main envisaged changes that have come forth are adaptive learning and extended reality. 

With adaptive learning, students can access a wide range of learning resources and educators can gain insight into how students are learning through their experiences. Using these new approaches, students will be able to obtain personalized learning tailored to their individual needs, and the time required for developing individual competence as well as face-to-face interaction with educators will be reduced. 

The Extended Reality provides students with learning experiences that may either blend physical and virtual elements or provide an entirely virtual immersive experience. The immersive experience can be delivered via headsets or mobile devices. It is possible to apply these sophisticated experiences to a range of clinical topics, from communication and clinical skills to deliberate practice of surgical procedures, as well as to integrate them with adaptive learning to gain even more benefits.

The blend of both adaptive learning and extended reality has the potential to transform medical education completely. Through Extended reality or XR, the medical students preparing for the examinations can benefit from the feedback, repetitive practice, curriculum integrations, range of difficulty levels, multiple learning strategies, the capture of clinical variation, individual learning, and the ability to define outcomes or benchmarks. Education Growth Advisors' research on the use of Adaptive learning revealed an 18 percent increase in pass rates and a 47 percent decrease in withdrawal from educational courses. With adaptive e-learning environments, students' profiles can be built and simple adaptive techniques can be used to provide a personalized learning experience.

With the advancement of technologies for screen capturing and online dissemination, large-group in-person lectures have been replaced by streamed online lectures. These learning resources are all easily accessible from mobile devices. Currently available technology, such as videos, podcasts, simple virtual reality, computer simulations, and serious games, are being implemented by coaching institutes like Dr. Bhatia Medical Coaching Institute to assist educators and facilitate student learning and training in these areas, all the while making medical educators remotely coach students with real-time mobile video tools and apps. 

A growing body of medical knowledge and a more complex health care system present greater challenges to teachers and learners in medicine. With medical school curricula already packed with conventional material, it can be difficult to find time to teach the expanding medical field. As a result, traditional models of teaching have not been able to keep up with these changes. New teaching methods incorporating technology in education have therefore emerged. 

Increasingly, the prevailing pandemic situation requires medical education to use e-learning in place of conventional teaching. By considering the minimal costs, flexibility, reduced reliance on local or regional barriers, online, offline, simulation, and the learning wherever feature of mobile apps, technology can be considered an effective adjunct tool in medical education.

The article is authored by Dr. Nachiket Bhatia, CEO, Dr. Bhatia Medical Coaching Institute and E-Gurukul