HUMAN SYSTEMS EXPLORER

(DOCUMENTARY)

Future Human Systems Exploration

The great success of the Human Systems Explorer project at Harvard Medical School has set the stage for the development of additional tools that harness the capabilities of web-based multimedia technologies. Because the project has been so unique, so well executed, and so diligent about executing usability analysis, it has had no real resistors, which Harvard Medical School CIO Dr. John Halamka says is extremely rare. Dr. Michael Parker thinks its adoption has something to do with its great accessibility, anytime, anywhere with Internet access. Regardless, it has become one of the favorite resources for students and staff on the Medical School's MyCourses web portal.

Indeed, digital technologies have changed medical education extraordinarily over the past few years. Dr. Halamka remembers a time when students had to spend hours in the pathology laboratory with glass slides and a microscope, trying to bring medical samples into focus. Today, in contrast, the Medical School has digitized its entire slide collection. The next step, says Dr. Halamka, is to move beyond one-dimensional slides to three-dimensional structures. He imagines a future in which students can study anatomy and physiology with a computer-based "virtual human" that can be manipulated and studied in a virtual environment.

For Dr. Schwartzstein, who has worked closely with Dr. Parker on interactive modules, educational technologies are especially powerful due to their ability to integrate and synthesize complex medical concepts-and this integrative approach is the wave of the future. He says it only makes sense for a field like medicine, which studies something as dynamic as the human body, to have teaching tools such as interactive diagrams that mimic that dynamism. Most importantly, medical students and residents need to have the ability to conceptualize how a change in one system has downstream effects in other parts of the body. A change in pressure in the lungs can impact how the heart works. A change in how the heart pumps blood to the kidneys affects renal function. "Being able to anticipate and understand those effects when they occur," he says, "is the key to being a great doctor, not just a good one."

The Human Systems Explorer modules are valuable, Dr. Schwartzstein says, because they present students with active systems and then require students to manipulate those systems and watch what happens in the body. He feels that future technologies will be similarly successful if they can teach this kind of integration, so that medical students come away from the table with a visceral, instinctual sense for the pieces of human physiology and how they fit together.