ENHANCING CLINICAL TEACHING WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES - WHAT CAN WE DO RIGHT NOW

Effective small-group clinical teaching requires recognizing the chall enges posed by clinical settings, mastering certain teaching skills, a nd responding to the needs of what is often a diverse group of learner s. Information technologies can enhance clinical teaching by increasin g the amount of relevant clinical information available to learners, a llowing for the rapid integration of needed information into the teach ing encounter, facilitating information processing within small groups , and helping to compensate for the many discontinuities inherent in t oday's clinical teaching environment. However, as many clinical teache rs look toward future implementations of advanced, totally integrated medical information systems, they often overlook information technolog ies they have at hand right now-e.g., CD-ROM textbooks-that can measur ably enhance their teaching, The author describes the ''real-world'' u se of several available technologies (for example, ''bookmarking'' MED LINE access points) and offers suggestions for how they might be used by faculty in clinical settings.