The virtual clinical campus

Abstract

The increased use of community sites for the clinical training of medical students creates many challenges for educators. Among them is the need to provide students in community settings with access to the same range of educational resources-the medical literature, student colleagues, feedback, and faculty-that are customarily available at academic medical centers. One way to make this access possible is to use information technology to create a “virtual clinical campus,” which would allow students to enjoy the best of both worlds: the immersion in primary care offered by the community-based setting and the knowledge-rich resources of the academic medical center, including the all-important library. With a virtual campus in place, students would be able to access most library resources, interact with their peers, ensure that they were meeting the goals of their community rotations, and participate with their colleagues in didactic sessions without having to travel. The virtual campus is technologically feasible and economically within reach. It is possible that the movement of clinical training into the community will make it imperative for all medical students to own their own computers and for medical centers to provide the infrastructure that would enable community sites to have access to a range of educational resources.