For the 40 residents in the Department of Emergency Medicine at GW Medical Faculty Associates, the pace of life is frenetic. Their demanding schedules at GW Hospital, Inova Fairfax Hospital, and the Washington, D.C. VA Medical Center leave limited time for weekly lectures. However, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which is responsible for the accreditation of post-MD medical training programs in the U.S., requires Emergency Medicine (EM) residency programs to deliver at least five hours of planned educational experiences per week.
The logistical challenge of meeting this requirement has inspired an innovative change to the department’s mode of curriculum delivery. Over the past 18 months, Ali Pourmand, M.D., assistant professor of EM, has been working to make recorded lecture content available online for both residents and medical students.
“We have technology today that we didn’t have 30 to 50 years ago,” Pourmand said. “Yet we are still teaching medical students the same way we did then.” In an effort to enhance the learning experience, Pourmand and his team, under the direction of Ray Lucas, M.D., associate professor of EM and vice-chair for Education, built a website where students and residents can access important coursework within three days of its original presentation.
“This way, students can access the information at a time that is most convenient for them,” Pourmand said. “While they’re biking, running, driving, whatever it is.” The online format is particularly accommodating for residents, whose schedules leave little time for such activities.
Detractors claim that this arrangement will limit the interaction between professors and their students, but that has hardly been the case at GW. Medical students who were accustomed to passively listening to live lectures now have the opportunity for substantial engagement with their professors. They are required to watch core concept lectures online before attending class and, as a result, are able to spend entire class sessions in lively discussion of the topic at hand.
Quizzes that include short answer and multiple choice questions are interspersed throughout the online lectures in order to track students’ rates of participation and understanding of the subject matter. Results can be emailed directly to the professor or printed and brought to class.
The quizzes have also provided evidence of the success of the web-based learning initiative. In an article presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, Pourmand and Lucas compared medical knowledge acquisition between emergency medicine residents who attended weekly core content lectures with those absent but viewing the same lectures in an electronic format. After a 15-week study of 39 residents, they were able to conclude that web-based training may result in medical knowledge similar to or better than attending traditional core content lectures.
The ever-expanding archive of online content is a valuable resource outside of GW as well. “There’s a growing community of people, not only in emergency medicine, but medicine in general, who are doing a lot of this — making podcasts, online videos,” said Lucas. “They’re pretty good about sharing content, as are we.” In addition to the lectures, users can find tutorials on everything from how to read a CT scan to how to put on a splint.
Current students are not the only ones to benefit from this online resource. Pourmand was pleased to hear from a former student, now in her first year of residency in New York City, who referred to the site for a refresher on how to perform an EKG in the case of ST segment myocardial infarction, a type of heart attack. “It’s wonderful to hear the continued use they have for the resource,” Pourmand said.
The next phase, according to Pourmand, is to get the word out to other departments about their success with web-based learning. “It’s something that everyone in medicine can benefit from,” he said. “And we hope they do.”
