Continuing medical education on the Internet: State of the art

✍ Scribed by Michael W. Peterson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 224 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-1912
• DOI: 10.1002/chp.1340190410

✦ Synopsis

The Internet and its graphical component, the World Wide Web (WWW), is changing the way we communicate, do business, and share information. The Internet also has the potential to change the way we educate our patients and ourselves. However, the Internet is a relatively new and untested technology that is largely unregulated and unsupervised.

Formal continuing medical education (CME) was introduced into Western medicine over 600 years ago; however, it was not mandated in the United States until the last 30 years. 1 Since then, medical schools and their faculty have taken a leading role in providing CME. 2 The Internet and computer networks provide a new technology for delivering distance learning and CME to practicing physicians. This technology allows the user to access topics of interest to them when they choose, without needing to travel and leave their practice. It is unclear if universities and university medical schools are using this technology to deliver