Do electronic health records help undergraduate students develop health informatics competencies?

In this paper we describe the effects of hands-on exposure to an educational electronic health record (EHR) system upon undergraduate health informatics (HI) student competency development. We undertook a quasi-experimental study (i.e. pre-test, post-test design), where students were given the opportunity to do hands-on work with an educational EHR over a 10 week period. HI student competencies were measured pre and post educational EHR exposure. Several HI student competencies improved significantly following hands-on work with the EHR. As well, students provided more in-depth and higher quality case study answers after working with the educational EHR.