MORNING REPORT :

The morning report is a staple didactic session in graduate medical education. It dates back to the earliest training programs, particularly in large academic institutions. Despite variation over the years, it remains a fundamental venue of medical education as a problem solving exercise derived from an actual clinical case allowing for multiple learners to experience and work through challenging situations that colleagues have encountered. This group training imparts valuable lessons that are then applied broadly at patients' bedsides.

Due to increasing demands on residents schedules with decreased work hours and elevated patient loads, education has been forced into smaller timeframes and must be delivered in a more efficient manner. With the majority of time being spent during morning report on data reporting and not data synthesis, the ability to concentrate learning into a 30-60 minute time frame is hampered.

Further education is also lost when the board is erased as the knowledge of the presented case is lost to chalk dust. Because of this problem, many have used PowerPoint presentations as a way to display the initial history and data, but this has failed due to limited interactivity and inability to standardize these presentations.

The Internet has revolutionized medical education. With testing, text books, journals, and other educational material available online, it is the natural progression that day-to-day medical education will follow. We have devised a secure, online, interactive database-driven website which can simulate the process of morning report.

WHY FROMTHECASEFILES :

FromtheCaseFiles.com is a web based, interactive, database driven solution to years of frustration from chief residents. The web site allows for residents to place in the history, physical exam, labs, images, and a presentation that is able to be viewed during morning report as a projection and allows for the history to be presented quickly and labs/images to be viewed without switching to other systems.

The information is stored in an online database that can be searched in the future so that the interesting cases and their learning points can be shared with future generations of residents.

No programming knowledge is required to enter a case as simple forms guide through the process. Privacy is maintained with user restriction of data until verified by an administrator for general viewing.