Impact of a medical school course in clinical epidemiology and health care systems

Many physicians have inadequate knowledge of the science of medical decision making and the health care system. We tested the impact of a medical school course in Clinical Epidemiology and Health Services Delivery using a prospective cohort design with participants from two classes. A 15 item pre-test was given to second-year students followed by the course which covered clinical and classical epdemiology, research methodology, biostatistics and health services delivery. The questions were embedded in the final examination and were also administered to a subset of the class prior to graduation. In addition, the survey was completed just prior to graduation by randomly selected students from the class without the course. The average score increased from 29.2% before to 85.5% after the course and 65.3% at graduation (p < 0.01). The scores from the non-course class averaged 45.476, and were significantly lower than scores of those who had taken the course (p < 0.001). The course increased students' knowledge and much was retained until graduation. Nan-course students learned only a small part of this information from other sources.