Curriculum inventory: Modeling, sharing and comparing medical education programs

Abstract

The growing role of audit, quality improvement and research in health professional education programs requires increased certainty and precision in descriptions of how curricula are structured and run. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory Standard provides a technical syntax through which a wide range of different curricula can be expressed and subsequently compared and analyzed. This standard has the potential to shift curriculum mapping and reporting from a somewhat disjointed and institution-specific undertaking to something that is shared among multiple medical schools and across whole medical education systems. Given the current explosion of different models of curricula (time-free, competency-based, socially accountable, distributed, accelerated, etc.), the ability to consider this diversity using a common model has particular value in medical education management and scholarship. This article describes the development and structure of the Curriculum Inventory Standard as a way of standardizing the modeling of different curricula for audit, evaluation and research purposes. It also considers the strengths and limitations of the current standard and the implications for a medical education world in which this level of commonality, precision, and accountability for curricular practice is the norm rather than the exception.

Acknowledgements

The development of the Curriculum Inventory has been a communal activity and while the authors all served on the working group we would like to thank the rest of the group for their many contributions: Marc Triola, Dmitriy Babichenko, Adrian Ballard, Dana Bostrom, John Mahoney, Quinn Montgomery, Robby Reynolds, Al Salas, Karen Sanders, Rosalyn Scott, David Wiener, Nabil Zary, Michael Awad, Leslie Bofill, Chris Candler, Brian Clare, Sascha Cohen, Charles Conway, Kristi Ferguson, Erica Friedman, Heather Hageman, Heidi Hays, Alison Loftus, Cynthia Lybrand, Lise McCoy, Tom May, Chandler Mayfield, Steve Mitchell, Dan Nelson, Peter Orr, Jamie Padmore, Catherine Peirce, Steve Pennell, Brian Rutledge, Paul Schilling, Juliane Schneider, James Shumway, Kevin Souza, Peter Speltz, Hugh Stoddard, Britta Thompson, Carrie Thorn, Janet Trial, and Peggy Weissinger. Finally, we would like to acknowledge Brownie Anderson and Susan Masters for their help in the preparation of this article.

Declaration of interest: The MedBiquitous ANSI standard is an open ANSI standard that is free for anyone to adopt, adapt, or use. Funding to develop the standard was provided by the AAMC. Terri Cameron is an employee of the AAMC and Valerie Smothers is an employee of MedBiquitous. We would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the AAMC to support the development of the Curriculum Inventory Standard and the MedBiquitous team in supporting and enabling this work. The authors have no other conflicts of interest to declare with respect to this article.