Context and State of the Art (SOA)

Context

This year, a medicine course started for the first time in Universidade de Aveiro (UA). In this course, students have a subject called Clinical Medicine in their first three years of the course. This subject has a module called Clinical Logbook which is evaluated according to the grading system of the Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA) model which first appeared in the Netherlands. This model was created to evaluate medical students hability to perform medical tasks according to a level of autonomy, which helps ensure that students have necessary autonomy to perform specific tasks before advancing into more difficult ones. It's also model that allows recurrent feedback to be given to students, which is crucial for their learning process.

In the current year of the course, the Clinical Logbook is still being done in a paper format. This means that students have to write down all the activities they do in a paper notebook, which is then shared with the tutor so they can write their evaluation. This process is very time-consuming and not very efficient, as it's hard to keep track of all the activities and evaluations in a single paper, considering some activities can be done multiple times. Delivering feedback is also a challenge, as it's hard to keep track of all the evaluations and give feedback to the students in an organized way.

The goal of this project is to create a digital platform that allows students and tutors to manage in an effective way evaluations and feedback replacing the current paper format.

State of the Art

There are already some platforms that allow students to manage their clinical logbooks in a digital format, for example EPATrackingTool and Simpl. The first one is not integrated with the university's systems meaning the students have to manually input all the data, which is a time-consuming process. The second one is integrated with the university's systems, but it's not very user-friendly and lacks some features that would be useful for the students and tutors. EvalMed could be a solution that combines the best of both platforms, being integrated with the university's systems and being user-friendly with additional features that would be useful for the students and tutors, for example, statistics about the student's performance.

The University of Aveiro currently has a platform called "Elearning" that is used by students and teachers to manage their courses. While it may seem like a suitable solution for digitizing the Clinical Logbook, it lacks the flexibility needed to support the 1:1 interactions between students and tutors required for effective evaluation and feedback management. Additionally, Elearning does not provide the necessary granularity for tracking clinical activities or delivering structured, competency-based assessments using the EPA model.