TIME as a generic index for outcome-based medical education.

TIME (Topics for Indexing Medical Education) is a general-purpose, intermediate-granularity taxonomy of topics that describe the content of undergraduate medical education. Within outcome-based education systems, curriculum planning focuses on the desired product rather than process, and the contributions of curricular elements to achievement of the outcomes must be made visible. In this paper, we discuss how TIME may be used as a content index in curriculum maps to link curricular elements to multiple outcome frameworks. This assists with curriculum development and evaluation, quality assurance, curriculum searching, detection of gaps and redundancies, and sharing of educational objects. TIME is available at http://www.time-item.org (username "guest"; password "guest").