Are you interested in learning more about MedBiquitous? Join us for our MedBiquitous orientation on September 14, where we will share an overview of the MedBiquitous program, its history, and the vision for the future being created by the Director, Steering Committee, and the community. 

MedBiquitous, the data standards program of the AAMC, establishes a common language, understood by both people and machines, that enables data and resource-sharing across organizations in health professions education and credentialing. This common language creates an infrastructure that supports education administration, quality improvement, research, and lifelong learning. 

Dr. Johmarx Patton, Director of MedBiquitous, will provide a structured walkthrough of the basics of MedBiquitous during this presentation. There will be ample time for questions and answers so that members of the health professions education and credentialing community at large can learn more about what MedBiquitous can do for them and their organization, as well as how they can contribute to MedBiquitous standards development.

“MedBiquitous Community Connection” is a series of free one-hour webinars featuring health professions educators and technology innovators from around the globe. “MedBiquitous Community Connection” provides a forum for community experts to share how digital technologies are promoting improvement and better outcomes across the continuum of health professions education. A portion of each webinar will reserve time for a brief Q&A session, allowing attendees the opportunity to dialogue with guest speakers.

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In medical systems, data standards are the key to the interoperability kingdom. Without them, you can’t combine a patient’s data from many different sources, find all tests of one kind (e.g., SARS-CoV-2 NAAT tests), or easily convert values of a variable delivered from two different systems that use different units of measure (i.e., pounds or kilograms to measure body weight). 

Two kinds of standards are especially important: 1) standards for data structures which define the data structured into records and what kind of slots exist in each record (think of these as data exchange formats, and 2) standards about the coding systems that go into these slots.

Medicare, for example, defines the structure for a billing record and the coding systems such as CPT, HCPCS, or ICD-10 that go into the slots of this structure.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has defined some of the structures required for the exchange of healthcare data (e.g. Health Level 7 [HL7], DICOM, etc.) and the code systems that populate one of the slots (e.g. RxNorm for drugs, SNOMED CT, ICD-10 for problems, and LOINC for laboratory and clinical observations). Recent regulations from ONC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) that require these standards will go into effect in 2022. 

Dr. McDonald will present an overview of major coding systems and data exchange formats used in healthcare, reflecting on his pioneering history in health data standards development, and what recent policy changes may mean for the future. He hopes to demystify what data standards are and how they can help to facilitate access and use by clinicians, patients, and researchers.

“MedBiquitous Community Connection” is a series of free one-hour webinars featuring health professions educators and technology innovators from around the globe. “MedBiquitous Community Connection” provides a forum for community experts to share how digital technologies are promoting improvement and better outcomes across the continuum of health professions education. A portion of each webinar will reserve time for a brief Q&A session, allowing attendees the opportunity to dialogue with guest speakers.

Please use Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari on this site.  Internet Explorer will not function properly as it is too old to be compatible with the system.

This presentation will dive into the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative's 4-pillar data strategy for managing lifelong learning and explore the supporting set of international data standards. These standards exemplify the collective research done at ADL known as the Total Learning Architecture (TLA). The first standard is Experience API, which is a data standard that allows for human and machine readable experience data for human performance data, as well as the traditional knowledge-based data. The second standard that will be discussed is the Learning Activity Metadata standard, which is used to increase the granularity of how learning activities are aggregated and described. This supports the second TLA pillar that captures all available learning opportunities that exist across a learning ecosystem. The third data pillar consists of reusable competencies and competency frameworks, which make up the RCD (Reusable Competency Definition) standard. This standard describes how competencies can be tightly defined, organized, and designed to be shared across organizations. Finally, the fourth pillar of Learner Profiles binds all aspects of the learner - their past, present, and future - into a cohesive data structure. These collective efforts form the TLA and can be leveraged collectively or individually to increase organizational success.

“MedBiquitous Community Connection” is a series of free one-hour webinars featuring health professions educators and technology innovators from around the globe. “MedBiquitous Community Connection” provides a forum for community experts to share how digital technologies are promoting improvement and better outcomes across the continuum of health professions education. A portion of each webinar will reserve time for a brief Q&A session, allowing attendees the opportunity to dialogue with guest speakers.

Please use Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari on this site.  Internet Explorer will not function properly as it is too old to be compatible with the system.

Andy Johnson: Webinar Facilitator
Specifications and Standards Manager

ADL Team Members

Ashley Howell
Project Manager

Yihua Liu
Data Analyst

Hunter Smith
Software Engineer

Florian Tolk
Software Engineer

These ADL Team members each bring a passion and interest to various topic areas to match their diverse interests, backgrounds, and research areas. Andy Johnson is the Specifications and Standards Manager at ADL and oversees both those efforts and their impact on policy. Ashley Howell is an expert project manager overseeing DoD modernization efforts that ADL is researching. Yihua Liu is a Data Analyst who has a keen interest in Experience API and the capabilities it can enable. Florian Tolk and Hunter Smith are both software engineers. Florian has an interest on competency and credentialing systems while Hunter's focus has been on metadata and learner profiles.

A consistent challenge that MedBiquitous has been called upon to address is bringing to bear a distributed set of tools and resources in support of health professions education (HPE) and credentialing. Although the MedBiquitous community has answered this call on multiple occasions, the challenge remains that the adoption of the standards and guidelines produced by the community occurs only in niche pockets, rather than by the HPE community at large.

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new program initiative “MedBiquitous 2030.”

In the last year, the global COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of our existing technology infrastructure. The delivery of education and the verification of credentials are just two examples of high-level processes that were disrupted and rapidly modified to accommodate changes that accompanied the pandemic. In almost every case, silos between existing technologies and data sets were made abundantly apparent, and integration and interoperability were touted as solutions to this dilemma.

In early April, the white paper “MedBiquitous 2030: Building the Digital Ecosystem for Health Professions Education” will be posted in our public comment forum for feedback. This draft has been reviewed by the Steering Committee and its subcommittees. This final draft of the white paper will be available for 30 days before comments are collected and integrated into a version that will be published on our website.

Hosted by Dr. Johmarx Patton, the April 20 episode of the "MedBiquitous Community Connection" webinar series will explain the direction that MedBiquitous is taking and provide a forum for the community to ask questions.

“MedBiquitous Community Connection” is a series of free one-hour webinars featuring health professions educators and technology innovators from around the globe. “MedBiquitous Community Connection” provides a forum for community experts to share how digital technologies are promoting improvement and better outcomes across the continuum of health professions education. A portion of each webinar will reserve time for a brief Q&A session, allowing attendees the opportunity to dialogue with guest speakers.

Please use Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari on this site.  Internet Explorer will not function properly as it is too old to be compatible with the system.

Dr. Scott’s webinar on Feb. 16 will focus on the influence MedBiquitous has had on her development and design of simulation-based education for both the healthcare team and patients. As a prelude to her personal story and in honor of Black History month, Dr. Scott will introduce the collective memory of the healing arts among African-Americans which led her to become the first female African-American cardiothoracic surgeon. Her recent academic interests have focused on educational technologies and simulation. Dr. Scott will describe her strategies to develop the first regional simulation program in the VA, which included both mobile, virtual and center-based activities targeting basic training, professional development and patient education. She will conclude with a vision for how MedBiquitous standards could lead to a digital ecosystem supporting simulation-based health professions education designed to achieve and maintain competence and provide an adaptive curriculum for the individual learner.

“MedBiquitous Community Connection” is a series of free one-hour webinars featuring health professions educators and technology innovators from around the globe. “MedBiquitous Community Connection” provides a forum for community experts to share how digital technologies are promoting improvement and better outcomes across the continuum of health professions education. A portion of each webinar will reserve time for a brief Q&A session, allowing attendees the opportunity to dialogue with guest speakers.

Please use Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari on this site.  Internet Explorer will not function properly as it is too old to be compatible with the system.