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ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: e-Prolearn (August 2004)

August 2004 Project of the Month: e-Prolearn

eLearning for professional development

Issues being addressed

Today, standard continuous medical education is focused on the transfer of knowledge from teacher / provider to the learner. Lessons or conferences on specific, sometimes highly specialised, topics are organised by local or national bodies. Attending physicians are granted Continuous Medical Education (CME) points or units toward their accreditation, but they need to attend events when and where organised. Learners need to collect a minimum number of CME credits per year in order to keep their accreditation. The focus is on what they should know and what they should learn as a group, rather than addressing an individual lack of knowledge. The current focus of standard continuous medical education is neither on the effective transfer of knowledge, nor more critically on changes in clinical behaviour.

The introduction of mandatory accreditation schemes in the EU Member States opens unprecedented opportunities for ICT-supported, learner-centred, commercially sustainable education services, aimed at the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) of various categories of medical doctors.

Modern Internet technology and CBT (Computer Based Training) platforms enable the creation of services which meet the fundamental needs of medical doctors: convenience, relevance and assimilability of the training.

e-ProLearn services offer all this at the highest degree: courses can be started, suspended and resumed at will, contents of training are all and only those really needed by any individual e-learner and pace of learning is set by the learner according to his/her own assimilation capabilities.

e-ProLearn services are based, whenever possible, on an automatic profiling of users through the use that medical doctors make of the Electronic Health Care Records (EHCR) management software in relation to the population they assist and comparing individual behaviours to reference profiles and/or average behaviours.

The e-ProLearn Consortium and its partners aim at becoming certified providers of CPD towards the accreditation of medical doctors in a number of European countries waiting for a truly European accreditation framework to emerge.

Objectives

The Market Validation phase for the e-ProLearn approach to Continuous Professional Development (CPD) involves a target population of General Practitioners (GPs) in Belgium and Italy, and a number of respiratory specialists split between the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK. In total 400 professionals participate in a real life trial where the innovative approach to training is compared to those in use today in terms of quality of learning and cost-effectiveness.

In addition to the usability of the service, the inclination of the users or, alternatively, of the healthcare system to pay for the service has to be verified to guarantee the long term sustainability of the business.

The business model that the e-ProLearn Consortium has devised needs to be checked against the market to ensure that it is realistic and that the market for CPD in healthcare is viable and exploitable by the Consortium and/or by other competitors. A Business Plan will be finally developed, to support the investment decision to move to the next stage of deployment.

The figure below graphically represents the business model that the e-ProLearn partners are going to market validate in the current Project.

Achievements

The first significant achievement of the project was the completion of the conceptual phase defining e-ProLearn service specifications, profiling specifications and content requirements. Intensive user interaction during this phase resulted in a break-through concept of “context sensitive learning” using the “push mode” of e-ProLearn which delivers to the physician learning content at the moment that a specific patient consultation or practice behaviour indicate that it is relevant.

The next key milestone was the set-up of an e-ProLearn platform designed to satisfy the needs of a well-identified user population and containing a sub-set of the full training facilities envisaged for the subsequent commercial deployment of the service.

General practitioners in Belgium and Italy and European respiratory specialists have begun trialling the e-ProLearn services using different aspects of the e-ProLearn platform’s functionality best suited to their needs and environment. Initial feedback from General Practitioners shows a very strong interest in the “context sensitive” offering.

Early feedback from meetings with EBAC, FECS, Surgeons, ECMID European Accreditation Bodies in March and April 2004 has been promising for a possible acceptance of e-ProLearn. The accreditation bodies have outlined the circumstances under which they would accept an e-learning tool such as e-ProLearn

Reference Data

Dedicated Web site: http://eprolearn.deda.com/
Project Reference: eTEN-27976
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start date: 01-02-2003
Duration: 18 months
End Date: 31-10-2004