Abstract:

For many years, public health campaigns have attempted to motivate people to improve their health culture, leading to a healthy lifestyle and last but not least to convince them that individuals are responsible for managing their own health. High health culture of the individuals can markedly change the risk of disease and is a key factor in terms of efficiency and successfulness of the treatment processes.

Since the Web inclusion into the practice of medicine the role of main actors has changed significantly. The medical doctor is no longer the only gatekeeper of medical knowledge and patients are able to acces on line recent medical information. The problem raised is that on the internet one cand find lots of materials from false “authorities” that confuse the patient and even interfere with their treatment.

Our solution to the patient-education problem was to provide information and education to patients by the use of a Learning Management Systems delivered through the Internet, within the framework e-EDUMED project. e-EDUMED which stands for e-Learning Educational Centre in Medicine was a two year European project started in January 2011 funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme (Leonardo da Vinci, Transfer of Innovation sub-programme) aiming to cope with the learning needs of medical professionals improving and updating their skills, knowledge and abilities towards a competitive European Medical Brand in ultrasound.

The project developed a virtual health educational center (http://www.e-edumed.ro/), providing on-line education and training materials by 2 interactive training modules in ultrasound adressed to medical doctors and nurse education and one online module for patient education.

The Ultrasound Patient Module includes general informations about ultrasound and different pathologies evaluated by this procedure, in close relation with the content provided by other learning modules developed within the project. This module keep the main structure of the ultrasound modules addressed to the doctors and nurses, but is designed from the patient’s point of view. This means that the structure of the topics and the content itself is developped in a simplified and accesible manner, in order to make the content clear and easy understandable for the broad audience of the patients regardless their age, social and cultural differences. The Module includes downloadable materials in the form of interactive learning courses for 16 topics (Ultrasound – general information. topics 1-5; Abdominal ultrasound - major diseases. topics 1-8; Special ultrasound. topics 1-3).

In this way we assure provision of a trustworthy informative digital content, broadly accessible and easy understandable for broad audience of all patients, in close relation with the content provided by the medical modules developed in the project.

Keywords:

Patient online education, problem based learning, ultrasound education.