What’s in your medical education data warehouse? Interviews with 12 US medical schools

Education data warehouses (EDWs) are an important and foundational information technology infrastructure of a successful program of learning analytics. EDWs, by virtue of their name, acknowledge that education data is not just within one database, but usually one location—the warehouse—that connects multiple data sets distributed across digital systems. Within medical schools, while the concept of an EDW may be grasped with an increasing level of certainty, the complexity of creating and implementing EDWs and using data from EDWs, represents a significant task involving many steps that are, at present, poorly defined. Accordingly, the authors interviewed a range of new and established EDW adopters from 12 medical schools across the United States to better understand the contexts of use and emerging best practices. This chapter presents the summary data and analysis resulting from those semi-structured interviews, toward informing practice across the medical school community.