Designing a Clinical Education Tracking System: An Innovative Approach

In clinical education, there is a need for constant evaluation, assessment, and at times immediate feedback for students to recognize areas of success, learning, and areas for improvement. The clinical educator is expected to manage the number of student evaluations and assess their performance, regularly, as needed, and over time. This allows appropriate and timely formative, as well as summative feedback to students and the program. Clinical programs face challenges in finding innovative and efficient methods to track and manage this large volume of seemingly disparate needed and required data. Traditional solutions entail paper-based systems or a paid proprietary clinical tracking system. However, both of these options have their own unique challenges. This perspective article proposes an innovative approach of collecting data electronically via online forms, processing and storing data in cloud-based databases and providing appropriate visualizations for the end users (i.e., students and educators) to analyze and assess the information. Migrating data to be collected in this manner allows for the integration of business intelligence (BI) techniques that provide data mining and machine learning in various user needed methods. This article presents a perspective and an innovative guide for clinical educators on how to develop and design a system that leads to positive sentiments and immediate student feedback regarding their progress to improve student outcomes.