Three students from the Wayne State University School of Medicine's Open Source Medicine organization received top honors at an Association of American Medical Colleges conference last month.
The AAMC's Central Group on Education Affairs held a joint meeting with the Central Group on Student Affairs and Organization of Student Representatives April 9-12 in Columbus, Ohio.
The Class of 2015's Jacob Price, and the Class of 2017's Sabrina Lin and Ankit Singla won first place in the "Innovations" category for their poster presentation "WikiNotes: Unifying Preclinical Education," the student-led medical education initiative that provides free digital course packs for medical students. The content is inputted, organized, updated, corrected and customized by students. It utilizes a fully-searchable, cross-linked format similar to Wikipedia. WikiNotes is accessible for those with a med.wayne.edu login at http://wikinotes.osmso.org.
"Much of the praise should go to Jacob Price for all of his work developing WikiNotes and on the poster itself," Lin said. "As the co-presidents of Open Source Medicine, the student organization that oversees this project, Ankit and I believe that WikiNotes has much potential to be a viable platform for unifying preclinical education. We would love to see our project inspire similar innovations at other schools and potentially in other settings. Winning this award affirms the value of this project and our efforts to cultivate it."
Open Source Medicine was started in 2011 to develop technology-based solutions to a variety of challenges at the school and beyond, including provide avenues for students to educate each other and their community, including at other universities.
"It was a wonderful surprise to hear that our poster received the innovation award at the conference. Up to this point, most of our feedback on the project has been from classmates who have thanked us for the help the site has provided them. Having our poster accepted to the conference, and then honored, serves to reaffirm our mission to improve students' access to their course information," Price said. "I hope that this recognition will instill the project with new energy to keep it growing and expanding in the coming years, and perhaps the broader exposure of the conference will inspire students at other programs to start their own projects."
The students were one of several Wayne State constituents who attended the meeting to represent a variety of school-related projects. Students from The Arie Foundation, The Community Homeless Interprofessional Program and the Co-Curricular Programs' Multilingual Language Sessions also presented projects at the event.