To survive medical school, medical students need all the help they can get. The School of Medicine decided three years ago that its students would have an additional tool: laptop computers that they must lease from the school.
Although the program had a rocky start, many students now express satisfaction with the computers and their capabilities.
In addition to accessing patients' files from their homes or the hospital, students now have easy access to learning tools, such as over 300,000 cross-sectional images of the human body as well as a complete electronic pharmacological database, said Susan Shaw, data processing specialist at the Thomas D. Kinney Central Teaching Laboratory, which provides technical support for the medical school.
She added that it is extremely difficult to be acquainted with every new drug that comes out on the market so the database-which is updated every three months-should be a great help to students.
Dr. Dan Blazer, dean of medical education, said, "The major advantage of the computer has been that it serves as a resource for students who are at outlying sites when they are doing clinical work."
Officials hope the laptops will be even more useful once a new amphitheater, equipped with ethernet jacks at each seat, is completed shortly. This feature will allow students to have access not only to class notes but also to images and databases over the World Wide Web during lectures.
Online testing is also becoming a reality, students said, as they download examinations for completion and then submit them electronically.
Shaw, said the cost per student is $125 per month for 26 months-a total expenditure equivalent to purchasing a new computer.
At the end of a 26-month period, Shaw said, students are given the option to buy the machines at a fair market price.
Although buying a laptop may seem as inexpensive as leasing one, Shaw cites the free technical support, insurance and availability of discounted software as unparalleled benefits of the leasing scheme.
Eric Harker, second-year medical school student, said the computers were very helpful in some courses, but others could have been done without them.
"I love the laptops," he added.
The program was not always so polished, said several members of Class of 2000, the program's "guinea pigs."
New IBM Thinkpads were provided free to the Class of 2000, but third-year medical school student Andrew Kaplan said they were plagued with hardware deficiencies.
"The Thinkpads were a bust," he said, explaining that they often experienced hard drive and power supply failures and were handicapped by a passive matrix display screen which prohibited the use of graphic-intensive programs. The medical school upgraded to Dell Latitudes for the two subsequent years, and Kaplan said those machines are performing better.
"This [program] is a process, not a product," Blazer said, "there is a learning curve with both students and faculty."
In addition to leasing the hardware, the University extends its software site licenses to the laptops, allowing students to use highly specialized and often expensive medical software at a small fraction of its retail cost.
The leasing program also includes insurance against theft, damage or loss.
Twenty other medical schools have similar programs, Blazer said. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill started a similar program this year.
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