Teaching Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health to 15,000 medical students in Mexico: the UNAM experience

The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is the largest University in Latin America. The Department of Biomedical Informatics of the School of Medicine of UNAM was created on September 2010 to teach the subjects of Biomedical Informatics I and II, in the 2nd and 3rd semester of the career of Surgeon, respectively. The general objectives of these subjects are that medical students a) acquire the informational and digital health competencies necessary to practice general medicine, b) make medical decisions based on the best evidence and in critical and ethical clinical reasoning, based on the rational use of state-of-the-art technological resources. The educational model initially built its contents from the Biomedical Informatics textbook of Columbia University, International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and Advisory Panel for Medical Informatics of the Association of American Medical Colleges. It incorporates the student knowledge about search, selection, and recovery of biomedical information, translational medicine, hospital information systems, SADCs, telemedicine, artificial intelligence, and robotics, as well as technology evaluation, for its application as enhancers of medical practice. The academic program has been nurtured by international models such as UNESCO ICT Competency Standards, European Digital Competency Framework for Citizens, Core Entrustable Professional Activities for Entering Residency of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and Milestone Clinical Informatics Project of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (AMGME). In almost 10 years, more than 100 teachers and teaching assistants have been trained to teach more than 15,000 students through a blended-learning model. The vision of the DIB is to be a national and Latin America benchmark model for training health professionals to apply the knowledge and tools of digital health to help raise the quality of medical care through the rational use of technological resources.