About Us

Medantic Technology is the Distance Learning Division of MD Informatics, LLC, a Utah Limited Liability Company. The name Medantic Technology declares our tri-partite charter as a medical education technology provider. Hence, our motto: "Where Medicine, Learning, and Technology come together."

As a team of highly-skilled physician informaticists, educators, instructional designers, and former clinicians, our goal is to become a leading provider of medical Distance Learning solutions for healthcare organizations and individuals worldwide. Read on to see how our technology development and corporate strategies have been designed to meet this goal.

Our offices are located in beautiful Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, but the reach of our operational network extends to every corner of the USA and beyond.

About Our Logo

We chose the Venn diagram to display the relationships between Medicine, Learning, and Technology. Where these three domains intersect is where Medantic Technology operates. Hence, our motto: "Where Medicine, Learning, and Technology come together."  View our logo splash screen here.

Our Technology

Medantic Technology provides end-to-end solutions for the creation, cataloguing, logical aggregation, delivery, and tracking of high quality distance learning content. This is accomplished by first providing a searchable repository of digital content indexed against standard controlled vocabularies for optimum re-usability and shareability. It has been shown that content developers spend at least 33% of their time searching for lost content, often ending in futility. Adding then to the inefficiency of content development is the re-creation of those lost assets.
With Medantic Technology's Ontology 2003 Digital Asset Management System, content developers can incorporate our asset management tools directly into their workflow for efficient content processing and cataloguing of their materials.

Multimedia processing (e.g. image re-sizing, cropping, optimizing, etc.) is another time consuming task for content developers. Our remote authoring tools are integrated with the digital asset management system, enabling rapid and efficient incorporation of pre-indexed assets into learning objects and courseware. Especially designed for non-tech savvy content authors, these tools eliminate the need for behind-the-scenes graphic design.

For learning/content management, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Often it seems that trying to deliver custom content via a given commercial-off-the-shelf Learning Management System (LMS) is akin to fitting a square peg in a round hole. For this reason, Medantic Technology has adopted the strategy of building custom Learning/Content Management Systems (L/CMS) to fit any need. All of our LMS solutions perform reliable content and user tracking for usage, progress, and performance. And we're well versed in the SCORM standard.

If there is one area at which we are best, it's content delivery. Medantic Technology specializes in instructional design that pays heed to contemporary cognitive psychology research. Our learning platforms have been designed with iterative end-user input and have been rigorously studied in partnership with academic institutions for learning effectiveness, usability, and applicability to target audience training. Our cross-platform applications perform well at any bandwidth level on desktop browsers, portable computers (laptops, tablet PCs) and handheld devices (Pocket PC).

Finally, we design and build all of our applications in-house using a range of development and database tools, including Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, and ColdFusion MX, and Microsoft SQL Server. With experience in a broad array of programming languages and database management systems, we've stuck with these tools because we've found no other combination that provides the same balance between short development cycles, robust and reliable delivery to high-volume traffic, and dynamic, interactive, multimedia interfaces.

Our Research

Medantic Technology (MT) sets itself apart from other commercial vendors of educational software through rigorous study of the effectiveness of the pedagogical approaches and instructional design of our educational software offerings. In particular, as case-based learning (CBL) applications begin to penetrate medical education markets, it is incumbent upon technology developers to show not only that user satisfaction is high, but also that their applications are having the intended effect - to improve knowledge retention through deep memory formation, by reinforcing learned concepts in a computer-simulated practice environment. In this spirit, Medantic Technology regularly conducts rigorous testing of its pedagogical approaches in cooperation with major U.S. academic partners. Recent studies were funded under an SBIR Phase II award by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of Naval Research, Contract No. N00014-03-C-0452. Both studies are currently under preparation for journal submission.

The Medulator Comparison of Methods Study (MedCoMS)
MedCoMS was conducted in collaboration with the University of Utah School of Medicine (UUSOM), Department of General Internal Medicine. This study compared the relative pedagogical effectiveness of our Web-based CBL platform to traditional classroom instruction using PowerPoint-based lecture materials. The primary objective was to measure the effect of Medulator virtual patient cases on computer-assisted clinical performance.
View the MedCoMS study here: MedCoMS_summary.pdf

Medulator Analogical Reasoning Study (MARS)
MARS was conducted in collaboration with the UCLA Department of Psychology. This study examined several aspects of Medulator's case-based learning (CBL) approach with a focus on Analogical Reasoning (a.k.a. Case-Based Reasoning) and explicit comparison of target cases to cases with similar surface and deep structural characteristics and whose solutions are known. We also examined the effect of learner-written case summaries on overall diagnostic and therapeutic performance.
View the MARS summary here: MARS_summary.pdf

User Satisfaction Surveys
To complement MedCoMS and MARS, follow-up surveys were conducted to determine the degree of user satisfaction with the Medulator learning approach and program performance. Here are the results: MedCoMS follow-up survey  ¦  MARS follow-up survey

Our Corporate Strategy

Medantic Technology was founded by a small group of physician informaticists on the premise that the e-healthcare education and training industry would grow rapidly and that an organization producing instructionally sound, compelling content, delivered with cross-platform capability, in a high volume, high quality, low cost environment would succeed. We believe the most successful products are designed with one thing in mind: the customer. That's why we involve end users at multiple stages in every product development cycle. In order to achieve economies of scale in production, Medantic Technology has developed a revolutionary e-learning architecture and continues to develop a series of web-based remote authoring technologies and content management systems that make high volume production possible, even for the non-tech savvy user.

To keep operating costs low, while preserving the ability to provide customers with the highest level of expertise in every domain of knowledge, we maintain partnerships with some of the most respected academic institutions, knowledge providers, researchers, and medical publishers in the world. Here's a list of some of our partners:

• UCLA
• SUMMIT (Stanford University Medical Media & Information Technologies)
• University of Utah
• Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
• The Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine
• Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins
• Cisco Learning Institute
• EAI Corp.
• Gold Standard Multimedia

Executive Management

Terry Clark, MD, F.A.C.S.  —  CEO and President  —   e-mail

Dr. Clark practiced General Surgery in both the Federal and Private sector. During this time he successfully developed and sold a healthcare related business. Following this he completed a two year fellowship in Medical Information Sciences and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to lecture internationally on information technology in healthcare. He has been active in the Distance Learning field for many years and has been an invited speaker for Microsoft, the Department of Defense, Internet 2 project, University of Jordan and the Object Management Group (OMG).

He is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Medical Corp (reserve) and a veteran of Operation Desert Shield/Storm. Currently he participates with the military through the Distance Learning activities at the Navy's Institute of Simulation and Training and the Army's Distance Learning program at Fort Sam Houston.

Gregory Thompson, MD, MSc  —  Executive Vice President  —   e-mail

Since completion of his formal medical training in 1992, Dr. Thompson has covered a wide spectrum of titles and roles in healthcare and e-learning. His career began as a general medical officer in the U.S. Air Force. He was then hired as the youngest Associate Chief of Medicine within the Veterans Administration system. While working in the VA, he served as a clinician, administrator and educator as well as an active implementer of the VA's world-class electronic medical record system.

His experience with EMRs led him to complete a 2-yr fellowship program and Master of Science degree in Medical Informatics at the University of Utah. Dr. Thompson is formerly the Director of CME/CPD at Medschool.com, where he designed, developed and implemented the widely popular Patient Simulator software - a Web-based, multi-media, interactive case-based learning system - for practicing physicians. Dr. Thompson earned his M.D. in 1989 at the University of Louisville and completed an Internal Medicine residency at Vanderbilt University in 1992, the same year he became Board-certified. He completed a Certificate of Medical Management in 1994 at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, University of North Carolina.

Cheryl W. Thompson, Ph.D., R.D., CNSD, Vice President, Health Promotion and Education  —   e-mail

After completing her undergraduate degree in nutrition at the University of California, Davis, and a dietetic internship and masters degree in education at Vanderbilt University, Cheryl practiced as a Registered Dietitian for over twenty years. Cheryl's primary area of interest has been enteral and parenteral nutrition and she has been a member of numerous nutrition support teams over the years. An increased interest in research, health promotion and education led her to pursue her doctoral degree at the University of Utah. Cheryl's current projects include an educational manual on coping for home enteral nutrition consumers and an enteral nutrition practitioner tutorial. Cheryl is also active in several national organizations (including Dietitians in Nutrition Support, the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, and The Oley Foundation), is the author of numerous textbook chapters and professional papers, and enjoys public speaking on a variety of nutrition-related topics, coping and resilience.

Medantic Technology, LLC. is a privately held company.

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