Integrating Digital Healthcare Education in the medical curriculum

Healthcare is undergoing profound changes due to increasing numbers of older patients with increasing comorbid complexity, combined with an ever more challenging availability of staff. The need to reduce the burden on healthcare professionals is fueling the digitization of healthcare. Digital healthcare comes in many forms and is increasingly used in clinical practice, i.e. the adoption of electronic health records, video consultations, wearable devices inside and outside the hospital (eHealth and telemonitoring), software tools like AI image analysis, responsive monitoring, and large language models.
Although this transition has started years ago, the medical curricula are still lagging behind in training students with respect to this digital transformation, thus not equipping our future health professionals with the required knowledge and skills to support this digital transition. Digital Healthcare Education (DHE) plays an important role in preparing future health care professional in the optimal use of these new technologies to maintain quality of care. Recently, a new, dedicated DHE Team was formed to design new DHE modules and implement these in our educational program to equip (future) professionals with the necessary skills to integrate and use digital healthcare applications in clinical practice.
The DHE Team started with the development and organization of modules and courses for the JSM Bachelor Honours Programme with key educational objectives in data science, machine learning, AI, and eHealth. These initiatives showed the value of and need for interdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare education and practice. This work also lays a solid basis for the integration of these and other new DHE modules and courses in all curricula of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, and a comprehensive framework for a faculty-wide DHE learning trajectory.
In conclusion, our main aim of this ongoing effort is to integrate effective digital health education, teaching future medical specialists the basics.