Founded by Johns Hopkins Medicine and leading professional medical societies, MedBiquitous is a non-profit, international group of professional medical and healthcare associations, universities, commercial, and governmental organizations dedicated to advancing healthcare education through technology standards that promote professional competence, collaboration, and better patient care. MedBiquitous is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop information technology standards for healthcare education and competence assessment.
MedBiquitous members are creating a technology blueprint for professional healthcare education. Based on XML and Web services standards, this blueprint will weave together the many activities, organizations, and resources that support the ongoing education and performance of healthcare professionals, creating more integrated access to educational resources, scientific journals, pharmaceutical and device product information, and clinical trials and registries. Ultimately, this blueprint will seamlessly support the learner in ways that will improve patient care and simplify the administrative work associated with education and competence assessment.
Current MedBiquitous standards and development efforts include:
- Professional Profile - provides a common format for exchanging clinician contact, education, training, certification, and membership information.
- Healthcare Learning Object Metadata - based on the IEEE standard, provides a standard way of describing healthcare educational resources and activities.
- SCORM for Healthcare - a version of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative's SCORM model for online learning that implements Healthcare Learning Object Metadata.
- Virtual Patients - provides a common format for sharing a snapshot of clinical data to be used as part of an interactive, educational scenario.
- Medical Education Metrics (MEMS) - provides a common format for gathering and communicating evaluation data on healthcare education activities.
- Activity reporting - provides a common format for reporting professional education and certification related accomplishments
- Competencies - provides a common format for representing a list of competencies relevant to a profession or specialty.
- Journal services - provides a common interface for exchanging information about journal collections, journal issues, and scientific articles.
- Content syndication - enables broad distribution of relevant news and educational resource summaries using RSS.
- Single Sign-on - enables seamless access to multiple resources through federated identity.
MedBiquitous XML specifications build on existing XML standards created by organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, Oasis, HL7, IEEE, and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, but tailor them for healthcare education.
In accordance with ANSI requirements, MedBiquitous adheres to the principles of openness and due process for its standards development activities. Educators and industry alike collaborate to develop standards and exchange ideas about innovative uses of Web technologies for healthcare education and communities of practice.
Both non-profit organizations and corporations can join MedBiquitous. For more information, see Non-profit Membership and Corporate Membership.
The MedBiquitous Standards Committee, the consensus body for MedBiquitous ANSI Accredited Standards, is open to all materially affected parties.
