Digital Health Understanding and Preparedness of Medical Students: A Cross-Sectional Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digitalisation is changing all areas of our daily life. With COVID-19, digital health received an additional boost in the medical area. The usage of telemedicine applications increased by 70% in 2020. The prediction for artificial intelligence (AI) applications shows a sharp increase over the next few years. This changing environment requires new competences from physicians in all specialities. Therefore, more and more medical schools adapt their curricula. OBJECTIVE This study systematically surveyed the knowledge, attitude and interests of medical students in Austria. These results will help to further develop the medical curriculum, as well as to increase our understanding of future physicians by other health care market players. METHODS A web-based survey consisting of four sections was developed: Section one queried demographic data, section two assessed the current digital health knowledge of medical students, section three queried their attitudes about the future impact of digital health in medicine and section four assessed the recommendations medical students have for the medical curriculum in terms of digital health. This survey was distributed to a total of 11,978 student at all public Austrian medical schools. RESULTS 8.4% (1017 students) of the medical student population started the survey, 5.4% (650 students) of the medical students completed it. At the knowledge self-assessment section the medical students reached mean of 11.74 points (SD 4.42) out of a possible maximum of 32 (female mean 10.66/ SD 3.87, male mean 13.34 / SD 4.50). The results are stable across different study years. The attitude section showed that students see digitalisation as a threat, especially with respect to the patient–physician relationship. The curriculum recommendation section showed a high interest for topics related to AI, a per study year increasing interest in impact of digital health in communication, as well as a decreasing interest in robotic related topics. CONCLUSIONS There is good knowledge of and high interest in AI among the medical students. In other areas such as telemedicine, medical databases, imaging and robotics, the knowledge is much lower; the interest for additional trainings in these areas is also low. The attitude towards digital health can be described as sceptical. Overall, they see a negative impact on patient-physician communication and are afraid of a negative impact of the internet. A low knowledge level of digital health leads to reluctance against the positive effects of digital health. To ensure that future physicians keep pace with this development and fulfil their responsibility towards the society, medical schools need to be more proactive to foster the understanding of medical students that digital health will persistent alter the medical practice.