The Design A Case Story

Design A Case began in 2000 when a group of faculty in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch teamed up with a programmer and began to try to build a template to make it easier to build online case studies for their third-year clerkship students to use. The project was funded by a 3-year grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Services and Resources Administration (HRSA). The first version of Design A Case was successfully implemented it in the clerkship in 2002. The team continued in 2003, funded by a new grant from HRSA, and set forth to build Virtual Families, groups of 6-8 cases that represented a whole family’s worth of patients for the students to treat. The first completed Virtual Family was incorporated into the clerkship in 2005, and the families continue to be used by students each month.
Throughout its early development, the Design A Case team invited other schools to learn about the project and use the software. From 2002 to the present day the team has offered workshops and presentations on Design A Case at national conferences.

In 2006 the Design A Case team joined forces with the Dean of the School of Medicine to begin to create a multidiscplinary curriculum that includes tracking of all patient encounters as well as supplementary online learning. In addition, Design A Case is inviting other institutions to subscribe to the software and implement it in their own curricula.

In 2007 the team released its latest version of the software, and in 2008 plans to release another update, complete with an integrated logbook and targeted case assignments.