Medical curriculum standards: Towards relational database transformation

Medical and healthcare education address the need for integration of systematic technological standards into various virtual learning environments, which systematically support modern pedagogical trends and approaches. The integration of various systems for curriculum management helps to make study programmes more transparent and easier to track, while being better understood by students, teachers, curriculum designers, guarantors and academic institution management. There are several standardised frameworks implemented in medicine and other health professions, but which one is the most stable, robust and up-to-date support for medical and healthcare education? This paper introduces the MEDCIN project and the use of existing technical standards (the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory and Competency Frameworks) into a real medical education context. The MEDCIN web-based platform offers storing the curriculum in the form of standardised set of building blocks, sharing among the academic community and analysing basic attributes as well as doing more complex analyses and visualisation.