Design, implementation and evaluation of a spiral module combining data science, digital health and evidence-based medicine in the undergraduate medical curriculum: a mixed methods study.

Background Digital health, data science and health informatics are increasingly important in health and healthcare, but largely ignored in undergraduate medical training. Methods In a large UK medical school, with staff and students, we co-designed a new, “spiral” module (with iterative revisiting of content), covering data science, digital health and evidence-based medicine, implementing in September 2019 in all year groups with continuous evaluation and improvement until 2022. Results In 2018/19, a new module, “Doctor as Data Scientist”, was co-designed by academic staff(n=14), students(n=23), and doctors(n=7). The module involves 22 staff, 120 hours(43 sessions: 22 lectures, 15 group and 6 other) over a 5-year curriculum. Since September 2019, 5200 students have been taught with good attendance. Module student satisfaction ratings were 92%, 84%, 84% and 81% in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively, compared to the overall course(81%). Conclusions We designed, implemented and evaluated a new undergraduate medical curriculum that combined data science and digital health with high student satisfaction ratings.