Abstract:

Digital training can revolutionize healthcare education and improve the quality of lifelong learning. New requirements and priorities in this area are based on critical problems, such as population ageing, growing of patient needs and a shortage of health professionals. Digital developments, including eHealth, aim to address these issues by making healthcare more efficient and bringing patients and care closer, reducing the burden among healthcare professionals.

The DIGI4ME Erasmus+ project brings together educational institutions and centers, healthcare associations and leading companies to provide advanced digital training to medical professionals. During the first phase, there were analyzed the digital skills required by healthcare professionals to effectively use eHealth solutions and clinical imaging devices. Based on this information, the project partners created user-specific training modules on advanced image manipulation and organization. Currently, the training is ready to offer vocational open online courses (VOOC) for digital skills in healthcare, including clinical imaging, big data and databases.

The gap of skills in digital health technologies is an aspect that negatively affects the efficiency of medical services and ultimately affects society. The new curriculum developed by the project partnership meets the needs of health professionals by promoting digital skills, encouraging the use of ICT technologies in healthcare, and supporting vocational education. The vocational education training (VET) program is divided into four curricula: Digital Technology, Health Data Science, Health and Safety and Cross-cutting Skills.

The project identified the digital skills required for health professionals to use eHealth solutions and validate specific training needs for physicians and experts in digital technologies for medical imaging equipment. The main objective of the project is to fill the skills gap for healthcare professionals and provide an innovative training framework together with a certification system. The project’s partner developed a wide range of courses to upgrade health professionals, covering levels up to European Qualifications Framework Level 4. All materials and courses are freely available as open educational resources (OER) on an online VOOC system where interested users can register, attend, and evaluate all courses. Teaching and assessment methods are designed to assess and achieve the best possible outcomes.

The curriculum on digital skills for health professionals consists of three stages:
(1) identification of curriculum objectives and learning outcomes;
(2) development of teaching and
(3) assessment methods, along with review and improvement of the curriculum.

The new platform and the training modules are essential for doctors in the entire European Union to ensure up-to-date skills. The current paper includes useful information for accessing the healthcare staff platform with pathways and carefully chosen learning modules to correspond to the areas of expertise, core knowledge and health professionals skills, as well as an application based on the most recent researches in the domain of bioinformatics, augmented reality and gamification.

Keywords:

Educational platform, healthcare professionals, curriculum, learning objectives, courses.