Information Resources Valued by Medical Students in a Clinical Reasoning Course: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

The clinical reasoning process for arriving at an accurate diagnosis represents a complex activity. How medical students harness existing information resources in their clinical reasoning courses has not been reported before. This cross-sectional study surveyed students to recall their most useful information resources halfway through their series of clinical reasoning courses. Students then evaluated the comparative usefulness of these selected resources. Sixty-nine of the 107 students enrolled in the clinical reasoning courses completed the three-part survey (64.5% response rate). Students found point-of-care tools, journal articles, textbooks, and diagnostic software to be most useful.

Keywords:

• Differential diagnosis
• undergraduate medical education
• medical students
• diagnostic techniques and procedures
• problem solving

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our faculty colleagues Drs Paul McGuire, Deepti Rao, Patrick Rendon, and Justin Roesch for their encouragement to pursue this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Please access our dataset at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hsc_hslic/2/.