Clinicians and computers: friends or foes?

Doc’UMVF: Two search tools to provide quality-controlled teaching resources in French to students and teachers

The UMVF project is a federation of medical teaching resources covering 32 medical schools in France. Today, the indexing of these resources is carried out manually by the CISMeF team at the University Hospital of Rouen. This indexing is based on MeSH thesaurus. We use a subset of SCORM metadata standard. This choice was defined in collaboration with the French Medical Virtual University consortium (French acronym: UMVF). Currently, with the UMVF searching tool (called Doc'UMVF), medical students can reach more than 3300 resources useful in their curriculum. Doc'UMVF is developed in close collaboration between the medical informatics laboratories of Rennes and Rouen. In this paper we present two complementary searching tools based on different methods and which are integrated and used to improve both the relevance and the coverage rate of the answers. A specific searching module has been built to retrieve specific resources concerning the National Medical Exam ENC ("Examen National Classant") is also available. Nevertheless, due to lack of time, numerous resources are not yet indexed. Therefore we have decided to use also automatic indexing method (Nomindex). This approach will be improved by further research works, resulting from Rouen and Geneva teams. After having built a searching meta-motor, our objective is to develop a meta-tool intended to index the whole set of digital pedagogical resources produced by the UMVF framework. This manual re-indexing will be carried out only for the most important resources (national references), with a more or less fine granularity.

A web-based teaching resource to prepare for final undergraduate examination: a French pilot study

Access to accurate and quality-controlled health information on the Internet for medical students is not an easy task. CISMeF is the search tool of a MeSH-indexed directory of medical Internet resources in French. Since 2004, a new French Pre-Residency Examination (PRE) is compulsory for all medical students in the 6th year of the curriculum. The goal of this study is to evaluate CISMeF as a tool to provide teaching resources available on the Internet covering PRE material. The CISMeF terminology and the PRE CISMeF module are described. To assess the CISMeF performance in covering PRE program, its precision (number of relevant resources/number of overall resources extracted by CISMeF) and coverage (number of PRE questions covered by at least one resource in the CISMeF gateway) were computed. The CISMeF module for the new French Pre-Residency Examination is efficient as it already covers 95.7% of the program with a precision of 82.2%. Our data demonstrates that CISMeF is acceptable to guide students' learning and should be a useful teaching resource for the preparation of the French Pre-Residency Examination.