Innovations in Global Medical and Health Education - Volume 2014, Issue 1

Certain aspects of healthcare education are difficult to teach in real world environments or in isolated classroom settings. These include, but are not limited to, collaboration and interdisciplinary teamwork skills that are necessary for improved team performance and patient care outcomes. Virtual simulation is a growing field for training and continuous professional development activities and is conducive to local and international clinical training and collaborative projects.

The authors examine theories of collaboration applied to virtual worlds, along with case studies, to demonstrate virtual simulation's applicability to a variety of teaching environments.

In addition, virtual environments have applications to interprofessional healthcare training and team formation. International partnerships for education can benefit from using virtual environments to foster team-building activities without geographic boundaries.

Virtual environments have been instrumental in the growth and sustainability of international networks of educators and, when feasible, should be utilized as a tool for the development of international partnerships.

Formative assessment has been shown to improve medical student performance and retention, but many learners lack access to formative assessments because faculty members have limited time to create such resources, and acquiring existing commercial review banks is expensive. In response, we developed a collaborative learning platform for medical student self-assessment called Osmosis (http://osmosis.org/). Osmosis is a web- and mobile-learning platform that provides free access to thousands of crowd-sourced, high-yield practice questions and explanations. The quality of these questions and resources is enhanced through a unique social rating and commenting feature.

During the first year Osmosis was launched at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in January 2012, approximately 250 students in the first and second year classes spent over 2,400 hours answering more than 5,000 questions close to half-a-million times (∼2,000 questions answered/student). In addition, over 1,000 Creative Commons-licensed images and YouTube videos have been shared. Usage data and reception by students indicate that the platform fits well into busy schedules and that participants value its role in promoting collaboration and self-assessing knowledge gaps.

We are currently developing additional features for the Osmosis platform related to knowledge retention and curricular design. Since the vast majority of questions and resources on Osmosis are shared under non-restrictive licenses, such as Creative Commons, we are making Osmosis available to peer institutions. It is our hope that more students and faculty members will benefit from, and contribute to, the Osmosis library.

The traditional methods of education, while once revolutionary, are failing to keep pace in the twenty-first century. OPENPediatrics^™ has created an interactive, virtual training and knowledge exchange platform to enhance the quality of pediatric critical care. It has the potential to revolutionize the post-graduate medical education model. Designed by experienced physicians at Boston Children's Hospital, in collaboration with IBM Interactive, it offers asynchronous interactive learning and various avenues for knowledge sharing outside the walls of individual institutions. It is creating a digital, global community, based on adult learning principles, provided at no cost to the user.

In the United States and around the world there have been massive changes in the way that health care is evolving – the way that we deliver care, the models of care, the concept of the interprofessional team, the system of care as a network that extends increasingly outside of the hospital much more than in, population and global care, and evidence-based medicine. We are challenged to keep up with our education system's “adaptivity” in this dynamic environment.

At the same time the disruptive effects of technological advances are dramatically accelerating and will challenge the way that healthcare providers, schools teaching young doctors, and patients themselves will experience and understand clinical data. There are emerging technologies that will be implemented around the world, almost instantly; whereas, these analogs in the past took decades to spread globally.

The loss of 400,00 lives annually due to preventable, adverse outcomes is believed to be the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer.

The leadership of the University of South Florida, Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) has heard this concern and developed a national model for improving medical education and patient safety, as well as aggressive and needed healthcare solutions through the use of cutting edge technology, innovation, and simulation.

CAMLS' goal is to use technology, simulated environments, and team training to transition medical education from an apprenticeship model to an evidence-based competency model that improves patient outcomes and reduces medical errors.

The processes used at CAMLS are reflective of the instructional design process and team training approach used successfully in aviation and the military.