Discovering Standards-based Learning at Point of Care

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DESCRIPTION: Current approaches to continuing medical education (CME) are inadequate for a number of reasons. First, simply providing content to passive learners through lectures and scientific articles has been shown to be largely ineffective in changing physician behavior. Second, CME content rarely targets an individual's specific deficiencies in knowledge. Third, there is no simple means of finding content specific to those deficiencies. Educational materials are stored in information silos that are unable to interoperate with outside systems. Finally, despite efforts by many educators and specialty groups to define medical curricula, there are no standards to link the learning objectives and competencies within medical curricula to educational content. We propose to build an open and extensible information system that addresses many of these shortcomings. The system includes: - A gateway, driven by Web Services, through which learners will be able to discover courses on multiple distributed systems. The gateway will allow learners to search for courses based on clinical competency and other criteria. - A metadata repository that harvests information about educational resources on multiple systems. Resources will be tagged using MedBiquitous/SCORM metadata and linked to competencies within medical curricula. - A curriculum repository that stores searchable medical curricula. - A Web Services registry that enables the gateway to interoperate with multiple repositories within the system. The resulting system will be deployed in clinical environments and undergo evaluation with usability testing. The software will be freely distributed as open-source software and the resulting standards will be promoted for widespread adoption.