Future Doctors Join Digital Revolution in Athens, Ga.

LFour years of undergraduate classes, four years of medical school and three to seven years as a resident – this adds up to thousands of hours spent mastering facts and developing skills needed to save lives.  

But the modern medical student’s new best friend is likely to be an iPad or a laptop, not a book that weighs as much as 5 pounds and costs upwards of 70 dollars. The proliferation of portable devices that provide instant access to the Internet is bringing the training of physicians into the 21st Century.

Some mainstays of medical education have been digitally reincarnated. Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy, first published in 1948, has been used by generations of first-year medical students to figure out what they are seeing (and feeling) in gross anatomy lab. The book’s anatomical illustrations can now be accessed via apps.

Only into his first year of medical school, Matthew Lustig is using it to test his knowledge. 

“It shows me a body and I can peel off pieces of the body to learn the layers,” said Lustig, an Army National Guardsman and recent UGA graduate.

The traditional approach to medical school can be lonely. After spending at least half of each day sitting in lectures, most students end the day scrutinizing various textbooks. But in Athens, the GHSU-UGA Medical Partnership takes a different approach. Lectures fill only two hours of each day and team-based exercises, lab sessions and small group discussions make up the rest.

Some of those sessions are led by Gregg Nagle, Ph.D., a professor of cell biology and histology who has been with the Medical Partnership since the first class enrolled in 2009. He’s enthusiastic about online access in class.

“I think it really helps students if they can go through a curriculum where they’re actually part of the learning and aren’t just passive,” said Nagle, who has been teaching medical students and future researchers for more than 25 years. “We can have eight different people accessing eight different questions at the same time, so we can move much more quickly.”

Students like Lustig are just starting the learning process, the majority of which is around a conference table or practicing on mock patients. Third and fourth years leave the classroom behind to work mostly in hospitals, private practices and clinics. Rotating from one specialty to the next, the students assist residents, interact with patients and carry out basic medical procedures.

This year, the Medical Partnership’s first set of third-year students received iPads to help them access information they would need to provide the best care possible.

“I think there are all kinds of possibilities for how technology can help medical students as they’re becoming doctors,” said Janette Hill, Ph.D., who has studied learning and technology for many years.

A UGA instructional technology professor, Hill has joined forces with the Medical Partnership and St. Mary’s Hospital to study how the students use their iPads and how this may affect what they learn. Hill believes that learning habits ingrained in the classroom and on clinical rotations could have long-term benefits for tomorrow’s physicians.

“I think the depth of learning that can occur is different because you don’t just have one resource – the instructor or one textbook,” said Hill. “You’ve got an entire class, all your classmates that can contribute in a variety of ways.”

Nagle agrees that the amount of information the students can access changes the class pace, dynamics and engagement.

“We just had hardcopies and books, so the discussion was much slower,” Nagle said. “Now everyone has a laptop; I’m the only one with a hardcopy.”

But some things in medical school may never change.

“It’s different from undergrad, when I had more time to do extracurricular activities, and now it’s just school,” said Lustig. “I expected medical school to be a challenge, and I was right.”

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