Medical Education of the Future?
Friday, April 27, 2007
| Ramesh Ramloll
The current technology landscape is ripe for the emergence of a wide range of distance learning and simulation based medical training. Training can be delivered at the point of need and be implemented in more engaging ways. The fidelity of simulations seems to be following Moore's law. Increasingly they are being made available right at the desktop/laptop/tablet and other mobile devices. The scope for designing virtual learning spaces is tremendous and they can indeed be constructed based on a mashup of various emerging trends. For example, medical device simulations can be embedded in a large scale massive multiplayer environments and made available to avatar doctors, nurses, residents and other stakeholders. Virtual replicas of instrumented manikins can be linearly translated and reinvented in such virtual worlds. Students and instructors can share a virtual hospital and devices and virtual patients to engage in group decision making, interactions and collaborative learning. Processes, protocols, competencies can all be evaluated in such environments. What is more exciting is that the tools for creating such spaces are slowly getting out the hands of software specialists and dedicated high end design teams into the hands of subject matter experts. Are we at the threshold of a revolution in medical education? What are the challenges that remain? Are the challenges more cultural than technical? What do you think?