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

To ensure veterinary students are prepared for clinical practice, curricula must provide opportunities for students to learn about the cases most frequently seen in practice. Currently, there is a gap in the literature with regard to the identification of common clinical topics encountered in equine primary care practice in the UK. This study aims to address this gap by utilizing text-mining techniques on electronic medical records (EMRs) to produce a ranked list of the most common clinical topics encountered in equine primary care in the UK. The study included 1,092,731 rows of data from 150,465 equine patients between 2012 and 2022, sourced from six primary care equine practices. Dictionaries were developed in the text-mining software and applied to the corpus of EMRs, enabling the identification of 30 common clinical topics. The clinical topics were ranked in order of their prevalence, and estimates of incidence rate per horse-year calculated for each. Results showed lameness, vaccination, sedation, dental, and worming as the five most frequently mentioned clinical topics in equine primary care EMRs in the UK. This work provides an evidence-based list of commonly encountered clinical topics in equine primary care practice, guiding educators to focus their teaching and curricula, and students to prioritize their learning. The results of this study provide data-driven validation of core concepts that should be prioritized within equine undergraduate curricula.