MANUSCRIPT: Free open access medical education can help rural clinicians deliver ‘quality care, out there’.
Rural clinicians require expertise across a broad range of specialties, presenting difficulty in maintaining currency of knowledge and application of best practice. Free open access medical education is a new paradigm in continuing professional education. Use of the internet and social media allows a globally accessible crowd-sourced adjunct, providing inline (contextual) and offline (asynchronous) content to augment traditional educational principles and the availability of relevant resources for life-long learning. This markedly reduces knowledge translation (the delay from inception of a new idea to bedside implementation) and allows rural clinicians to further expertise by engaging in discussion of cutting edge concepts with peers worldwide.
Written by Brian S McGowan, PhD
Dr. McGowan has served in leadership positions in numerous medical educational organizations and commercial supporters and is a Fellow of the Alliance (FACEhp). He founded the Outcomes Standardization Project, launched and hosted the Alliance Podcast, and most recently launched and hosts the JCEHP Emerging Best Practices in CPD podcast. In 2012 he Co-Founded ArcheMedX, Inc, a healthcare informatics and e-learning company to apply his research in practice.
