Virtual Communities in Medicine International collaboration in Medical Education

1
Virtual Communities in Medicine International
collaboration in Medical Education

• Shlomi Codish, MD
• Head, Computer Assisted Learning Unit
• Ben Gurion University of the Negev

codish_at_bgu.ac.il
2
Stating the problem

• Medical information is exponentially increasing
  and constantly changing
• One person can never know everything
• Medical schools must shift from teaching
  information to teaching learning skills
• Teaching takes place in hospital while a lot of
  medicine takes place in the community

3
Teaching Clinical Medicine

• Takes place in many different locations
• Done by many people with differing
• attitudes
• motivation
• teaching skills
• Patient population not
• Similar across wards
• No consistent exposure

4
Patient simulations

• Computerized, and later on, Web-Based patient
  simulations are applied to address these
  problems.
• Various approaches
• Cognitive approach
• Specific skills, i.e.
• physical examination
• history taking
• differential diagnosis lists
• Simulate specific problems to cover a core
  curriculum

5
Problems again (and solutions?)

• Quality of medical information
• Peer review?
• Complexity of computerized systems
• Front ends (SRDC?)
• not invented here syndrome
• a-priori consortia
• Volume of simulations

6
Specific initiatives

• Stanford Short Rounds Consortium
• User based
• Diagnostic Reasoning
• commercial
• CLIPP cases
• Academia and professional organization
  cooperation
• ACP online
• Professional organization
• IVIMEDS
• Virtual medical campus academia and commercial
  interests

7
Case study - CLIPP

• Initiated by COMSEP Council on Medical Students
  Education in Pediatrics
• Cases created by COMSEP members
• Extensive Peer Review process
• Case selection academic and well planned
• Financed by COMSEP

http//www.clippcases.org
8
(No Transcript)
9
(No Transcript)
10
(No Transcript)
11
(No Transcript)
12
(No Transcript)
13
(No Transcript)
14
Case Study SRDC

• Project initiated at Stanford SUMMIT
• Easy front end text based application for
  creating simple simulations
• Financed by research funds
• No significant participation
• No peer-review
• Project fizzled out

http//summit.stanford.edu/ourwork/DEVELOPTOOLS/SH
ORTROUNDS/srdc.html
15
Case Study DxR

• Initiated at SIU as academic endeavor
• Went commercial various vendors
• Cases developed at developers discretion
• Minimal peer-review
• Funded commercially
• Widely used, in very varied situations

http//www.dxronline.com
16
(No Transcript)
17
(No Transcript)
18
(No Transcript)
19
(No Transcript)
20
IVIMEDS The International Virtual Medical School

• Joint effort of 37 medical schools in 14
  countries
• An attempt to benefit from each members
  expertise to create a full medical school
  combining e-learning and face to face teaching
• Use of gt200 simulated patients!

http//www.ivimeds.org
21
Hardware simulators

• While not the topic of this talk
• Hardware simulations are available in Israel on a
  national level
• Advantages include
• Enables hands-on approach
• Nearest real life situation
• Particularly useful for emergency medicine and
  procedures
• Disadvantages include
• Costly to maintain and to use
• Requires travel
• Obviously, a correct mixture is best

http//www.msr.org.il
22
Other collaborative efforts

• Health Education Assets Library H.E.A.L
  (www.healcentral.org)
• Dermatology Atlas (www.dermis.net)
• Pathology question bank
• ACP Clinical Problem Solving Cases
  (cpsc.acponline.org )

23
(No Transcript)
24
(No Transcript)
25
(No Transcript)
26
Summary

• The problems facing medical education dictate the
  use of simulated patients
• This is costly, time consuming and frustrating
• Most previous efforts have failed
• Poor planning
• Poor funding
• Poor implementation
• Software design
• Educational design and content
• Actual student use
• Poor evaluation

27
More summary

• The only way to go is to combine efforts
• Development consortia more successful than
  individual efforts