Boston University develops GPI Distance Education Collaborat

[soon2bMS]

GPI Distance Education Collaborative

What is the GPI Distance Education Collaborative and why did it form?

Our group is an outgrowth of the Generalist Physician Initiative (GPI) Project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from 1994-2000. The project’s goal is to develop community-based, primary care education programs at 15 medical schools selected by the Foundation for funding. In January 1999, 10 of the GPI-funded schools formed the Distance Education Collaborative and began discussion of joint strategies to develop teletechnology applications that can support community-based education at medical schools nationwide. The collaborative group is composed of physicians, medical educators, and technology specialists who recognize a common need to provide geographically dispersed medical students with access to educational activities which are distance-neutral and time-flexible. Meeting this need requires exploitation of the telecommunications infrastructure that links medical centers with the communities they serve, and application of new methods to deliver technologically enhanced education via that infrastructure.



Why is community-based education for health professionals important in America today?


The Generalist Physician Initiative Project and other national healthcare workforce initiatives, working in concert with changing financial structures and educational philosophies in the world of academic medicine, have had a significant impact on the way medical students are taught in America today. In increasing numbers, students at most medical schools are being sent away from the medical center for part of their training to learn first-hand about how to deliver primary care to patients in the community setting.


Working directly with community health professionals teaches future doctors valuable lessons that they could never learn from lectures, readings, and care for patients on the hospital wards. Our students experience the economic and logistical challenges of real-world practice. They learn how to communicate with patients and their families. They also learn to evaluate patients with typical symptoms of common conditions, in contrast to the serious and sometimes rare ailments that bring patients to teaching hospitals. Furthermore, the community itself serves as a learning laboratory for health professional students. While they are learning about the living and working conditions of their patients, they offer energy and talent for community initiatives, such as health education and service projects.



Why are telecommunications needed to improve community-based education?


For medical schools with community-based programs for their students, distance constantly challenges our ability to manage, enrich, and monitor the quality of the learning experiences we offer. Telecommunications applications allow us to extend medical center resources out to our community training sites, and develop and coordinate new learning activities for students. For this project, we propose to develop an innovative learning environment which will provide students on community assignments with high quality learning materials, easy access to information resources, and online links to faculty experts. They will also be able to use a structured case development template to create their own cases with their community teachers, based on real patients in the community, and discuss them with their peers.


While variants of case-based learning are nearly ubiquitous in medical schools, online access to interactive cases is rare, and few students have access to online case-based learning systems that teach them to access web-based information sources to help them work up these cases. Hence, distance education methods can be used to teach future physicians not only the fundamental skills of patient care, such as evaluating patient problems and developing a treatment plan, but also essential new skills in information acquisition and evaluation that they will need to practice medicine in any setting removed from the library facilities of the medical center.


The distance education enhancements we propose will address a number of the problems that challenge community-based training of health professional students, including the high variability in students’ experiences with patients, the need by students for enrichment activities that do not absorb the limited time of community faculty, problems in monitoring what students are learning, and inequities in learner evaluation.



Why do future primary care physicians need to use the Internet to access information?



About a third to a half of medical students become primary care providers in the community after completion of training, and in these careers they face real challenges. They have burdensome workloads, many are isolated from professional peers, and those who practice in rural and underserved communities are stretched simply to make a living. For health care providers in remote communities, these difficulties are magnified, not only by distance, but by the difficulty of caring for patients whose lives are often fragmented by poverty, poor education, and social and environmental problems.


One challenge faced by these and all physicians is the need for current health information. Because the medical literature increases by 600,000 print articles per year, physicians need an efficient way to access and evaluate reports on new therapies. Learning the multiple uses of the Internet will give these future practitioners ready access to the latest medical information, as well as opportunities for continuing education and collaborations with peers. It will also help them deal with patients who are with increasing frequency looking to the Internet to collect health information on their own. In the new century, physicians will be severely limited without skills in information access on the web, which will be the place to go for both online information and access to print sources.

This was taken from Boston University School of medicine website. It dosen't point to Boston University School of medicine moving to a distance learning format. However, the article does mention the advantages to using technology we currently have and the importance of physicians learning to use the internet to access information outside of medical school libraries.

As you can see from my previous 3 post, technology is advancing to a point which many medical schools are incorporating distance learning into their curriculum. Some are moving towards distance learning while other are only using it for part of their curriculum. As time passes, it will become harder for the medical boards to discredit anyone who learns via distant learning. In order for them to do so, they would have to ignore the advancement of technology.

I'm not doing this to encourage anyone to apply to an medical school which offer distance learning curriculums. I'm doing this because of all the bashing that has and continues to go on these and simular websites. I do hope that those whom these articles are directed can see.

I do understand that going to a medical school that offers distant learning is a risk. Going to any foriegn medical school is a risk, some more than others. It is understandable that one would choose to go to a medical school that is more established and offers the greatest possibility for an individual to become licensed here in the US. However, just because one goes to a medical that not among the big 3 or 4 or 5 doesn't mean that they are just plain ignorant of the fact.

I do hope that someday, I'll be able to vist sites like these and be able to chat with other medical students without being bashed for the medical school that I attend. Afterall, we will be doctors someday and I sure hope that our conversation isn't going to be about what medical school I attended and how foolish I was to attend such a medical school.

Dr.2B