Development of a student-created internal medicine frameworks website for healthcare trainees

Objectives: Describe medical student perspectives on framework learning and develop a free, online, mobile-friendly framework website.

Methods: Internal medicine clerkship students were surveyed at a single U.S. medical school regarding how they learn frameworks. We used Draw.io to create frameworks, which were edited by expert clinicians. Frameworks were hosted online through an academic server, and Google analytics was used to track website activity.

Results: Most medical students report learning frameworks from attending clinicians. We developed 87 frameworks on the "Penn Frameworks'' website, which was visited by 9,539 unique users from 124 countries over three years.

Conclusions: Most medical students perceive that they learn frameworks during clinical rotations from attending clinicians. We found that it is feasible to develop a low-cost, expert-curated, mobile-friendly resource to supplement in-person learning.