Introduction
The medical profession attracts top-level students and medical education is a long and complex journey with theoretical and practical interactive teaching that can be facilitated by technical solutions. Most important, within the medical profession, there is a continuous need for education and improvement of expertise throughout the whole lifetime career. This is particularly valid in the field of radiology. A US survey by CH Deitch et al. reported that full-time, post-training radiologists worked a mean of 50 hours per week, spending 4% per year on professional education and devoted 7% of their work time to teaching and research (1).
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we were contacted by several healthcare providers and educators in need to digitally transform their once physically conducted education and training programs to virtual, interactive online sessions. We hosted online courses, radiological society meetings, webinars, and hence enabled the radiological community (medical students, residents, and radiologists) to participate in training events where the radiology data was made available in our cloud DICOM viewing environment with lecture cases for all participants.
Below is a guide on how to perform this digital transformation using the Collective Minds Education platform.
What is Collective Minds?
Collective Minds is a healthcare collaboration platform, primarily focusing on medical images used in diagnostic radiology. In Collective Minds you can get access to the collective intelligence to discuss imaging-related findings, diagnoses to solve patient cases. You will also be able to develop and improve healthcare by facilitating collaborative evaluation of imaging data in clinical trials. Radiology training is enhanced with the platform enabling interactivity based on real data and professional tools.
Educational content for your training
An important reason why you should use Collective Minds for your radiology training is the ability to structure course content and give access to full cases online, from a computer, tablet, or smartphone.
For your course, you can control the access to content for course participants using our Groups concept and you can structure the content for each course element using Collections.
Figure: A Collective Minds Collection for training
Video explaining the Collective Minds Proxy
Structuring your educational cases in Collective Minds allows you to access them from anywhere at any time. Your courses become highly interactive as your participants are able to do radiological reviews of your cases from their own computers by just logging in using their web browser, without any software pre-installation.
Another enhancement and offering at Collective Minds is to leverage the existing content at Collective Minds and incorporate it into your own personal educational material. By searching the existing database of clinical cases and adding them to your own Collections, they can be part of your own training material.
“Pandemic restrictions were enforced with short notice in the fall of 2020 which could have compromised the quality of medical student radiology training. Thanks to the flexibility of Collective Minds platform and customer support, we could shift to online teaching and continue to deliver our medical student radiology training sessions with high quality. This was accomplished within 14 days from our first contact with CMRAD and their bank of preexisting cases to illustrate pathology was highly valuable.”
MD Lars Lundin, Radiologist at Uppsala University Hospital and teacher at Uppsala University
Live video sessions
Collective Minds Education works well with video meeting software such as Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Webex, and Chime. Keep in mind that you will be showing high-quality images, so your video client should be able to handle high-resolution streaming.
If your training is live, you would benefit from using a video conferencing tool that integrates a chat, mainly for users to ask questions or for troubleshooting. For interactivity, a polling feature can be used as well. Our experience is that the teacher needs an assistant that moderates the chat and supports participants with their troubleshooting so that the teacher can focus solely on delivering the course.
“It has been a real pleasure to work with Collective Minds to help transform our company from primarily providing ‘physical’ courses to go fully virtual. Our radiology courses during 2020 have been highly appreciated among delegates and faculty, and we are impressed by the level of service provided by the Collective Minds team to assist us in this transformation – and we truly look forward to continuing working with Collective Minds!”
Infomed (https://www.infomedltd.co.uk/)
Recorded content into course modules
At Collective Minds you can also store recorded video content for self study. Our partner eRad creates video recorded sessions enabling students to access the course on-demand and with all the cases being discussed available at Collective Minds.
The Belgian Society of Radiology hosted their first virtual annual meeting in November, including a pre-recorded case review session of MR Rectum by Prof. Dresen of UZ Leuven, and with all the lecture cases available at Collective Minds for the participants to follow along in the DICOM-viewer themselves.
The test and examination module
To further professionalize the education, and increase the level of interactivity, you may add a quiz and link to your cases, to make interactive assessments as well as exams. We worked continuously with the National Imaging Academy Wales throughout 2020 to build various courses using these modules, including Rapid Reporting- and Long Cases modules for their FRCR2b courses.
“During the first phase of lockdowns and travel restrictions we started working with Collective Minds to virtualize our internal resident training events, and we continued to leverage the platform for other courses and events throughout 2020, both internal and external, including the FRCR2b courses we hosted. Throughout 2020, Collective Minds have been very supportive and continued to innovate and enhance the service to our benefit, and they are an appreciated partner of the NIAW.”
National Imaging Academy, Wales, UK
The next level
To further enhance the radiology webinars- and online training events, you must do more than simply make the radiology exams available to your faculty and delegates. As we have all experienced, the video meeting client does not always work perfectly for everyone, and in combination with the workflow of today of toggling between the video meeting app, browser windows, presentations, and the DICOM-viewer is sub-optimal.
We are continuing to innovate to simplify the overall workflow and quality of the training events, thereby improving the overall experience for the educators, researchers, and course participants, lowering the barriers to getting started with online education.
How to get started?
Contact us at support@cmrad.com. We will give you an introduction to our service, introduce you to some key concepts and workflow aspects, and help you to set up your first educational event on Collective Minds.
Or book a demonstration over video
Anders Nordell, CEO, on behalf of your entire Collective Minds team!
References: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7997578/