1. Medical Student Exposure to Electronic Medical Records: Is First Year Too Early? Dr. Gerard Farrell, Director eHealth Research Unit Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Introduction & Rationale Methods Figures Results & Discussion Physician adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR), continues to be a challenge due to associated costs, business process disruption, lack of technology familiarity and support. Generations X and Y are both much more familiar with technology than most Boomers, the technology they are familiar with is focused on the Web. Most EMRs, even those delivered via the Web, are significantly more complex applications than Facebook or Google. Teaching of students still revolves substantially around documentation on paper and exposure to EMRs in Clerkship is sporadic, inadvertent and unstructured. If EMRs are to be perceived by students as valuable tools in managing patient information, then they must be introduced to the tool early in their training and shown the benefits and shortcomings of the technology. The question that arises is: “When can the exposure to EMR's begin?” OPTIONAL LOGO HERE Two one hour lectures were scheduled in February 2008. The first covered the role of the physician as information manager, knowledge navigator and communicator. Students were introduced to the EMR application. An assignment was given that involved entering data into and performing certain tasks within the application. Individual usernames and passwords were assigned, as well as fabricated patients with which to interact in the EMR. The students were told they were not to spend more than twenty minutes on the assignment. Details with respect to the assignment can be found in Appendix 1. Given the distance at which the EMR was hosted, it was decided to divide the student into groups which were given a three day window in which to complete their assignment; this would minimize concurrent use. During the second lecture students were invited to give reactions regarding assessment of the EMR as a tool. From a general point of view, most students completed all of the assignment without application-specific training; this is significant. Both in email and at the debrief at the end of the assignment, a small number of students reported difficulty finding patients in the EMR. As a proof of concept, the experience serves mostly to raise questions that require further investigation. EMR's can be used in the medical school curriculum, with introduction occurring as early as first year under controlled circumstances without the need for lengthy training Using the application without training is enabled by medical students familiarity with technology. It would appear that the EMR is sufficiently different from that with which they are familiar that some training is necessary; one wonders what this says for the design of EMR's in general. Conclusion On the basis of this of this informal analysis it appears that EMR's can be introduced to medical students as early as first year and useful information can be collected about their reactions to the technology. This academic year the exercise was repeated but with a technology readiness assessment of the students before the exposure and a survey of students' attitudes to EMR's before and after the exposure. Results are currently being prepared for analyses.