Harnessing Information Technology while Teaching in Distress: the Pandemic Toll vs. the Opportunity of Long-Awaited Paradigm Shift

Medical academic teaching has been under persistent scrutiny, while education in general underwent radical transformation in this century, when boundaries between teachers and learners are increasingly blurred and the very concept of reality is re-shaped. Based on a 2019 analysis of the two-year package comprising the biomedical informatics and biostatistics courses at a Romanian University of Medicine and Pharmacy, we conducted an ad-hoc analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic impact on our teaching. We profess that courses of information technology and data science in the medical curriculum should play a driving role in designing new educational approaches and instruments, subsequently contributing to shifting the vision of the future health professionals.