Medical student involvement in website development.

Background: The digital management of educational resources and information is becoming an important part of medical education.

Aims: At Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, two medical students sought to create a website for all medical students to act as each student's individual homepage.

Method: Using widely available software and database technology, a highly customized Web portal, known as the VMS Portal, was created for medical students.

Narrative medicine in surgical education.

Purpose: Narrative medicine is a patient-centered approach to the practice of medicine that rescues the patients' stories and integrates what is important to them into decisions regarding their health care. Our hypothesis is that narrative understanding enhances the patient-provider relationship and contributes to optimizing patient care. We propose to use written narrative reflection to capture and measure the general competencies of systems-based practice, practice-based learning, communication skills, and professionalism.