Digitalization of the clinical exam in Covid-19 pandemic: Karaganda Medical University’s experience

Abstract

Nowadays, Medical education in the Covid-19 pandemic poses a new challenge to explore approaches for delivering quality distance education, especially in the clinical competence assessments. Assessments of clinical competence approaches to conducting an exam, implementation of a new innovative strategy to the assessment procedure, minimize costs, and efficiency in using existing digital resources, have been revised. The study aimed to compare paper and electronic checklists used in Objective Structured Clinical Exams and assessors' self-perception of electronic checklists and technologies. Material and methods: The authors compared three types of checklists (paper, bubble, and electronic checklists) according to the following criteria: ease of use, registration, and authentication of examinees and examiners, processing of exam results, and cost benefits. Results: In the course of analysis, three versions of checklists were compared, thus identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each one, including the assessors' attitude to new technologies. Despite the high cost of the tablets compared to paper checklists, the use of tablets at OSCE had many advantages, and assessors mentioned that number of errors significantly dropped. Conclusion: Thus, digitalization of the assessment procedure helped streamline the exam process, securing evaluation data, and speeding up information processing, which significantly minimized the cost of human resources.