Creative e-teaching and e-learning of evidence-based medicine in resident physicians by multimedia technology

Article type
Authors
Huang Y, Huang Y, Yang Y
Abstract
Background: Several collaborations contribute to systematically integrate medical publications to make the growing body of information practical in daily practice. The early implementation of evidence-based medicine (EBM) to physicians is an important issue. Traditional teaching and learning are not efficacious, not evaluable and not recordable. Objectives: This new e-teaching and e-learning with multimedia technology aims to encourage physicians to get the best evidence for their decision making. Furthermore, the changes in clinical practice after implementation of EBM can be monitored. Methods and Results: The journal club is a scheduled academic activity every month and one resident is designated as the leader for the next journal club. The implementation of our EBM teaching and learning is integrated in a single multimedia system. Teachers upload the selected scenario, allowing the designated student to form a clinical question using PICO and search with keywords online. The system provides hyperlinks to EBM databases and our library to help students save time. Two-way editing and reviewing makes for efficient approval of the activity. The designated student completes the critical appraisal of the selected reference and prepares to give a summary report. The teachers lead and help all participants understand the study design, statistical methods and appraisal of the cited reference. Clinical decisions before and after the journal club of the same individual are compared with the reason for changing his/her mind. The students will also be tested months later for practicing a similar clinical scenario. Conclusions: The implementation of this teaching and learning of EBM helps refresh teachers’ and students’ information in medicine. The system provides one-on-one teaching and learning, whereas the journal club gathers teachers and students to learn together. The resident physicians gave good responses to this creative teaching. Since it is a new method in teaching EBM, means to evaluate the outcomes of this teaching and learning are not yet validated in our study.