Practical use of medical terminology in curriculum mapping

• We review the existing and widely-accepted medical terminologies and coding systems.
• We design and implement a web-based system for medical curriculum management.
• A practical use of the MeSH thesaurus in a curriculum mapping application is showed.
• Two data-analytical reports based on the MeSH thesaurus are described in detail.

BackgroundVarious information systems for medical curriculum mapping and harmonization have been developed and successfully applied to date. However, the methods for exploiting the datasets captured inside the systems are rather lacking.MethodWe reviewed the existing medical terminologies, nomenclatures, coding and classification systems in order to select the most suitable one and apply it in delivering visual analytic tools and reports for the benefit of medical curriculum designers and innovators.ResultsA formal description of a particular curriculum of general medicine is based on 1347 learning units covering 7075 learning outcomes. Two data-analytical reports have been developed and discussed, showing how the curriculum is consistent with the MeSH thesaurus and how the MeSH thesaurus can be used to demonstrate interconnectivity of the curriculum through association analysis.ConclusionAlthough the MeSH thesaurus is designed mainly to index medical literature and support searching through bibliographic databases, we have proved its use in medical curriculum mapping as being beneficial for curriculum designers and innovators. The presented approach can be followed wherever needed to identify all the mandatory components used for transparent and comprehensive overview of medical curriculum data.

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