Educating medical students in the era of ubiquitous information.

Health care around the world is going digital. This inexorable trend will result in: (1) routine documentation of care in digital form and emerging national infrastructures for sharing data that allow progress toward a learning health system; and (2) a biomedical "knowledge cloud" that is fully integrated into practice environments and accessible to both providers and consumers of healthcare. Concurrently, medical students will be complete digital natives who have literally grown up with the Internet and will enter practice early in the next decade when the projected changes in practice approach maturity.

Is the problem list in the eye of the beholder? An exploration of consistency across physicians.

Objective: Quantify the variability of patients' problem lists - in terms of the number, type, and ordering of problems - across multiple physicians and assess physicians' criteria for organizing and ranking diagnoses.

Materials And Methods: In an experimental setting, 32 primary care physicians generated and ordered problem lists for three identical complex internal medicine cases expressed as detailed 2- to 4-page abstracts and subsequently expressed their criteria for ordering items in the list. We studied variability in problem list length.