Enhancing CME with Web 2.0 tools
Posted on December 3, 2009 by ebrennan | No Comments
By Angela Murrell, The Scripps Research Institute
The November 20th MLGSCA Continuing Education program, “Exploiting Librarian Skills to Enhance Continuing Medical Education Programsâ€, was held in conjunction with the 13th Annual Conference for CME Professionals which is presented by the Southern California Medical Education Council (SCMEC). The venue was the Good Samaritan Hospital conference center, which was very nice setting with large meeting rooms and an auditorium.
The morning consisted of a joint session, which included a presentation by two MLGSCA members, Ysabel Bertolucci and Eve Melton (who are also Kaiser Permanente Medical Center Librarians) called “Leveraging Library Services for CMEâ€. Since this was a joint session with the SCMEC group, I think it was great that they were presenting some of the ways librarians are assisting with CME, especially at Kaiser. After having viewed MLA’s November 18th webcast on connecting to mobile users, I was excited to see that Web 2.0 tools were being used to enhance CME.
Some of the Web 2.0 tools they used included Delicious, LibGuides, and LinkedIn. Even though I had seen Delicious (back when they used all the periods in the name, i.e. De.li.ci.ous – or something like that) I had not seen it used in the hospital setting. Delicious is a website where users can bookmark webpages, add tags and descriptions, and others can see the list of bookmarks. Eve demonstrated how their bookmarks are grouped in “bundlesâ€. Bundles can be created to group tags, for example the Kaiser librarians created a “CulturalDiversity†bundle which includes seven tags. This would be similar to using “OR†in a database to search several synonyms. One drawback to using Delicious versus creating a webpage is that there is no automatic link checker in delicious, so someone does have to check that the bookmarks still point to the correct page. Another drawback was not being able to collect statistics on how many people visit the bookmark page or click through on any of the links.
Another Web 2.0 tool Kaiser uses is LibGuides, to create dynamic subject guides. They can even push their Delicious bookmarks to a LibGuide they create. LibGuides can be put outside of the firewall, adding to its usefulness to a community hospital’s outreach tools, as well as assisting with CME. LibGuides are flexible, allowing customization of the tabs to group resources. They also mentioned that there are CME groups on LinkedIn, the social networking site designed around job hunting.
Later in the day, when we separated from the SCMEC group to have the actual CE, the Kaiser Librarians gave us more information about the cultural and linguistic competency requirement for CME. This requires all CME programs to include a component on health disparities relating to the topic and how understanding the needs of diverse populations can improve healthcare for all patients. One way they suggested assuring that the CME meet this requirement would be to use the PubMed tool specifically for finding health disparity literature in Medline. The tool is one of the “Topic-Specific Queries†found on the Health Disparities and Minority Health Information page. This search can be combined with the clinical topic to find literature dealing with the disparities in that area of healthcare.
There was much more information provided and discussed that day about designing a CME, writing objectives, using partnerships to present a CME, and even a ready-made IPoC tool (PDF) and tracking database for free (see http://medicine.utah.edu/CME).
Posted 11/3/09
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