Computer Science: The Third Pillar of Medical Education

Abstract

In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) attributed substantial problems in the quality of American medicine to four domains: growing complexity of science and technology; the increase in chronic conditions; a poorly organized delivery system; and constraints on exploiting the revolution in information technology (IT). Although all of these domains have been improved by IT systems within the last decade, the U.S. health care systems has been slow to adopt these developments. We propose one way to combat such quality problems by incorporating a medicine-specific computer science (CS) curriculum as the third of Abraham Flexner's pillars of medical education.

Building a Culture of Computing in the Sciences Using Images as Data Within a Community of Practice

“…2 Education and training within the natural and physical sciences do not sufficiently equip students with the necessary experience and skills to meet emerging data processing and analysis needs and experts across scientific disciplines are raising this issue. [3][4][5][6] To this end, we created the Digital Imaging and Vision Analysis in Science (DIVAS) project.…”