See One, Do One, Teach One: Advanced Technology in Medical Education
Citation: Vozenilek, J., Huff, J. S., Reznek, M. and Gordon, J. A. (2004), See
One, Do One, Teach One: Advanced Technology in Medical Education.
Academic Emergency Medicine, 11: 1149–1154.
doi: 10.1197/j.aem.2004.08.003
Summary: Medical educators today are faced with the challenge of not only working on a tight budget and schedule but to teach high-risk, sometimes rare, skills and procedures. As technology use has grown in medicine, so has the use of web-based education, virtual reality, and patient simulations, which have eased the pressure on medical educators considerably, as long as educators are willing to embrace these technologies. The researchers have written several recommendations for medical educators. First, they recommend that all emergency physicians be computer literate. Their data was several years old even in 2008, when the article was written, but their findings were that many emergency medicine residents could not conduct a basic literature search. The second recommendation was that "every emergency department should have access to medical educational materials via the Internet, computer-based training, and other effective education methods for point-of-service information, continuing medical education and training." Again, the data was from 1999, but the study they used found that physicians had access to the Internet less than 20 percent of the time, and most physicians felt they should have full-time access to the Internet. The third recommendation was for real-time automated tools to be integrated into emergency department information systems for contemporaneous education. Fourth, the writers recommend a shared library of multimedia and video-based training. They made several recommendations about using virtual reality and high-fidelity patient simulators as well, comparing virtual reality with patients to virtual reality for commercial pilots. The writers concluded that emergency physicians and societies needed to embrace the changing technology and utilize it to its fullest potential.
Reflection: To find this article, I performed a Google Scholar search with Dr. Luck's search phrase - effectiveness of educational technology - and added the word "medical" to hone in to searches that had to do with my field of health science. I myself have felt restricted in my educational abilities by budget constraints. I learned patient care skills in a hospital on a day-to-day basis. I can't take three classes of 25 students to a hospital every day, or even multiple times per semester. Thus, finding easily-accessed web education resources and virtual reality programs is a vested interest of mine. I was disappointed that the article, written in 2008, included statistics from 1999, even though that was only nine years prior to publication. I would truly be surprised to find many emergency medicine residents who were unable to use a PowerPoint. Maybe a few less could use Google Scholar, but only because they might not have heard of it. Internet access is almost universal in hospitals at this point and I would guess that many physicians utilize it frequently. I can't say this for all hospitals, but when I left an HCA-owned hospital in 2005, we had online education opportunities at our fingertips and from what I saw during my recent experience as a patient family member, these opportunities have only multiplied exponentially for hospital employees. Did this article and its writers cause this explosion? Perhaps they influenced the decisions of a few physicians and administrators, but I think the most likely cause was the proliferation of online information. Emergency medicine training websites exist now for free for anyone - even 16-year-olds - to learn how to perform valuable emergency procedures. Who knows, we might even have non-physician-operated emergency rooms in the future... I don't know if I'm ready for that.
Personally, I can't wait for the cost of virtual reality patient simulation to drop to the point where I can afford to bring it into my classroom. In high school health science education, the logistics of getting students to medical facilities are prohibitive, but a programmable manikin will allow me to introduce my students to elevated heart rates and other dangerous conditions they would never see in a building full of their fairly healthy peers. Though I learned patient care skills "on the floor" and I survived, I remember feeling nervous about things like starting IVs, flushing IV lines, and even dealing with nauseated patients. Technology can't teach students everything they need to know, and they will still need hands-on practice to become competent medical professionals, but practicing on a simulated patient gives the student the opportunity to perfect the skill before using it on a real person. I am a fan of the use of technology in health education and I hope to see a lot more of it.
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