Every jurisdiction in medicine asks doctors to evidence their learning, and almost none of that evidence interoperates. A record built in one platform exports, at best, as a PDF; a doctor moving between the UK, Australia and Canada re-describes the same learning three times in three vocabularies; an appraiser or CPD Home receives artefacts whose provenance they cannot verify; and every platform, ours included, holds learning histories in shapes only it can read. This is a solved class of problem in other fields. It is time medical education solved it too, and this article proposes the starting point: an open, versioned, verifiable schema for the clinical learning record, published for comment, owned by no vendor.
Why a standard, and why now
Three pressures converge. Regulatory frameworks worldwide are asking for richer evidence, reflection, assessment, review of performance, while accepting it in formats no machine can check. AI has made learning capture trivial and learning verification urgent: when reflections can be generated and certificates are PDFs, the trustworthy artefact becomes the structured record with provenance, attestation and, where relevant, measured performance over time. And clinicians are more mobile than their evidence: portfolios should follow doctors across borders and platforms the way their qualifications do. A common record format addresses all three at once, and the alternative, a decade of proprietary diaries competing on lock-in, serves no one whose name is on a licence.
What the record must express
The proposed schema's field families, drawn from what regulators across the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Europe actually ask about, are these. Context: jurisdiction, professional role and declared scope, so relevance is assessable. The learning event: activity type, objective or clinical question, and why it arose. Provenance: source consulted, publishing organisation, jurisdiction, version or publication date, date accessed, and whether sources conflicted, because a citation without currency is trivia. Engagement: active time, measured versus user-attested, honestly distinguished. Measurement, where it occurred: baseline assessment, confidence, specific errors, remediation undertaken, immediate reassessment, and delayed retest at interval, the fields that let a record demonstrate rather than assert. The human layer: the clinician's own reflection, intended action, and any user-confirmed impact, explicitly attested, never machine-inferred. Governance: privacy attestation that the record contains no patient-identifiable information, accreditation status of the activity where any exists, a verification identifier, and version history so corrections are transparent rather than silent. Every field optional except the minimum context, because the standard must describe a webinar certificate as honestly as a full assessment cycle; the point is that what a record claims is machine-readable, not that every record claims everything.
What openness means here
Concretely: a human-readable specification and a public JSON schema, versioned, with example records; a permissive licence; a public repository accepting issues and proposals; and a request for comment addressed to the people who would live with it, medical educators, appraisers, responsible officers, CPD Homes, colleges, and other platforms, emphatically including our competitors, whose adoption would be the standard's success, not its failure. Governance should migrate toward a neutral home as adopters accumulate; a standard steered by one vendor is a format, not a standard. iatroX's commitment is the credible minimum: we will publish the draft, implement it as a first-class export beside our PDFs and CSVs, keep our implementation conformant as the schema evolves, and argue for no field whose only purpose is advantaging us.
What it would unlock
For clinicians: portfolios that move, between platforms, employers and countries, and evidence whose claims are inspectable rather than typographical. For appraisers and CPD Homes: at-a-glance distinction between activity, measured learning and attested impact, with verification instead of trust in PDFs. For regulators: the ability to say what good evidence contains and have systems answer in kind. For platforms: competition on the quality of learning rather than the captivity of records. None of this requires any regulator to mandate anything; it requires one usable schema and a handful of implementers with more interest in the category than the moat.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a product announcement?
It is a specification proposal with a product commitment attached: the draft schema, examples and repository are being prepared for publication, and iatroX will implement the format regardless of who else does. The announcement worth waiting for is the second implementer.
How does this relate to existing standards work?
Adjacent efforts in credentialing and learning records exist and should be borrowed from shamelessly; medicine's gap is a record expressing measured clinical learning with provenance and attestation. Where mapping to broader standards is possible, the schema should map rather than reinvent.
What can readers do now?
Two things: tell us what the record must express in your role, the appraiser's view is worth more than another engineer's, and pressure every platform you pay, including us, to export your learning in a form you could take elsewhere. Portability is requested into existence.