Background: Modern medical and healthcare curricula represent a highly complex mixture of different disciplines, specialties and pedagogical approaches, the nature of which can be difficult to communicate to key stakeholders. This issue is exacerbated when considering curricula beyond individual institutions at a local, national or international level. To date, there is no standardised way of describing and reporting curricula within Outcome-Based Medical and Healthcare Education. Methods: We conducted a state-of-the-art review of available technical standards in medical and healthcare education, and identified those most relevant to the field. Based upon this initial pool of standards, we applied a set of selection criteria to identify those standards that were both required and best suited to developing a standardised model for describing medical and healthcare curricula. In concert with this, we conducted a review of common systems in the field to identify the levels of support and compliance with these standards. Results: We identified standards and specifications from mEducator and MedBiquitous as being most suitable for inclusion in this model. In particular, the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory standard, as well as related specifications, are described in detail and proposed for use in best practice implementations. Conclusions: We propose a standardization approach involving the use of technical standards, compliant systems and standardized vocabularies for the description of medical and healthcare curricula. Such an approach can provide a detailed picture of a curriculum’s structure and address different technical and educational aspects of Outcome-Based Medical and Healthcare Education. The benefits include for faculty, policy and decision makers being able to better evaluate and measure teaching against the required outcomes, institutions to perform structured analyses and being able to compare their curricula, while students can better understand their intended learning.

Department of Learning Informatics Management and Ethics Karolinska Institutet Stockholm Sweden

Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses Faculty of Medicine Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Institute of Medical and Biomedical Education St George's University London United Kingdom

Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine Nanyang Technological University Singapore

Medical School Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki Greece

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