The University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) will start the second round of the "Digital Health" training track in May, which will increasingly focus on digital medicine, its challenges and its opportunities as part of the medical study offered there.
New study options for future doctors
Ethics, data protection and a new understanding of the role of the medical profession are just as much a part of the relatively new elective subject as technological innovations from AI to big data, deep learning and robotics to mHealth, virtual reality and telemedicine.
The new curriculum has been developed in collaboration with numerous UKE institutes, and the team of medical teachers is interdisciplinary supported by students and other faculties.
The aim of the integrated medical degree program (iMED) visionaries at UKE is a reformed study model for aspiring physicians that can be taken over by other university hospitals.
iMED brings together clinical practice and theory
Since 2012, iMED has supplemented the standard course Medicine for Physicians at the Hamburg site. Since the end of 2017, it has become the sole training standard there. iMED combines the theoretical foundations of medical studies directly with clinical practice.
As part of the iMED study programme at the UKE, important core competences and skills for the medical profession are imparted on the basis of topic-specific blocks. These include practical exercises for diagnostics and therapy recommendation as well as communication courses, in which aspiring physicians try out the medical consulting and mediation of sensitive topics under patient simulation.
With this, the UKE wants to reform conventional medical studies and strengthen practical, technological as well as psychosocial competences of future physicians.
Training location: a paperless hospital
The UKE is one of the German pioneers in the digitisation of the hospital IT landscape and is also one of the most modern university hospitals in Europe: in 2011, after successful digitisation and process orientation, it reached Stage 7 of the HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM).
More information can be found here.
Anna Engberg is a Wiesbaden-based freelance journalist specialising in health and technology
