Medical Informafics in Medical School: Should We Teach Concepts or Procedures? Marsden S. Blois, Ph.D., M.D. Section on Medical Informatics University of California, San Francisco At the University o f California, San Francisco (UCSF), we are in the midst of developing a curriculum in medical informatics for undergraduate medical students. This undertaking gradually came about for a number of reasons: 1. Several of our faculty had independently recognized that undergraduate medical students could greatly benefit from the technology of modern information management if they were more familar with it. They suggested that this subject be systematically taught in the required curriculum. 2. At the same time, other faculty were recognizing (as had the AAMC), that a leading complaint of graduating medical students for several years was the lack of training in the use of computer technology, and finally, 3. We have had a graduate program in Medical Information S~ence at UCSF for the past 15 years, which provided a focus for issues related to medical informatics. The co-existence of these factors, combined with the stimulus provided by the G P E P Report, led to the development of a proposal, and its acceptance by our Curriculum Committee, that
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