A novel electronic continuous medical education system for clinical psychiatry and neuroimaging

Abstract

Background:

eCME aims to create an electronic Continuous Medical Education system to aid the simple and cost-effective transfer of medical skills across Europe by proposing a unified integral panEuropean mechanism of accreditation for CME courses as expertise appears concentrated in a limited numbers of centers of excellence within Europe while researchers in smaller centers have difficulties in accessing information and acquiring the necessary skills.

Methods:

The eCME project will produce an on-line e-learning pilot in the English and Greek languages, with a multilingual potential, blended with hands-on medical courses, which focuses on the two critical and continuously evolving domains of clinical psychiatry and neuroimaging. This is achieved with the deployment of ICTs in order to develop an advanced, multi-lingual and secure e-learning platform through which CME can be carried out remotely across Europe. eCME incorporates content of a wide variety of multimedia formats taking advantage of the ever-increasing internet bandwidth availability across Europe.

Results:

The concept of an electronic CME accreditation tool was acceptable to the Psychiatrists surveyed. The project results are expected to have a significant impact in the established practices of continuing vocational training of medical professionals, enabling them to maintain, develop and increase their knowledge, skills and professional performance, with subsequent benefits to the services they offer to their patients.

Conclusions:

A novel electronic CME accreditation system like eCME could represent the means to addressing the European lack of access and thus gap of Psychiatric training.