Innovating for Curriculum Design Using a Text-Mining Exploration of Common Clinical Topics in Equine Primary Care.

The research paper explains how text-mining of electronic medical records was used to identify the most common clinical topics in equine primary care in the UK. The findings, showing lameness, vaccination, sedation, dental issues, and worming as the most prevalent topics, are used to guide the curricula for veterinary students.

Research Context and Goals

• The study was launched to fill an existent knowledge gap on the most frequently encountered clinical topics in equine primary care in the UK.
• The goal was to ensure the curriculums for veterinary students are well-equipped and focused on the most common cases, thus preparing students better for their future practice.
• The researchers used text-mining techniques – a method for extracting valuable insights from large volumes of text – on electronic medical records to achieve these goals.

Research Methodology

• The study incorporated a large volume of data – 1,092,731 rows from 150,465 equine patients spanning from 2012 to 2022.
• The data were sourced from six primary equine care practices in the UK.
• The researchers developed dictionaries within the text-mining software, which were then applied to the large corpus of electronic medical records.
• By doing this, they were able to identify 30 common clinical topics and ranked them in the order of their prevalence.
• Incidence rate per horse-year was also calculated for each clinical topic.

Research Findings

• The five most frequently mentioned clinical topics in UK equine primary care electronic medical records (EMRs) were lameness, vaccination, sedation, dental issues, and worming.
• These results provide a data-driven insight into the most pressing matters in equine primary care, thus giving veterinary educators a clear direction of focus for their teaching and course design.
• The findings also indicate to students what they should prioritize in their learning process to best prepare for their clinical practice.
• This evidence-based list contributes significantly to the prioritization of core concepts within equine undergraduate curricula.