• Government and academia are increasingly leveraging repositories and registries to promote the sharing of educational content, but many of these repositories and registries exist in isolation without the benefit of an overarching infrastructure. This discussion will explore the feasibility of a healthcare education registry that would connect disparate registries and repositories. A synthesis of ideas will be captured online.
  

Is there a need for a healthcare registry?

• If reviewers could tag objects, it would be useful.
• hso.info startring this summer. Registry of available content from existing repositories. Search engine crawls each document. They include all of med ed[portal and heal. Can sort by type of learning object, courses, etc.
• More granular pieces, like images, don't require review process.
• Community review/comments could be helpful for images.
• How will licensing be documented? Made explicit.
• Creative commons is one tool - need to account for consent and licensing restrictions.
• VA has some content that is for use within government only. to address those types of licensing restrictions. That information is captured within the metadata.
• Can the medical community come up with a common approach?
• Publishing community has DOIs to uniquely identify content. Will healthcare use a numeric system? Will healthcare registries use common medical terminologies? For example - CUI from UMLS.
• There are tools that let you enter search terms.
• How do you get people to contribute materials?
• UVA has an internal repository. If you use central support group, you have to share and put in the repository. That is one way to populate.
• Get people to ytalk before hand, share what the standards are.
• At U Michigan, DSCRIBE, students do the work. They tag the content, convert it to the right format, etc.
• Can healthcare lom catalog CME and organize in a curriculum? Yes.
• Catalog of materials, what would be used for what competencies would be useful.
• Using non-proprietary file formats is a challenge.
• Citation index functionality for the registry. Would address promotion tenure issues.
• Does healthcare lom line up with these needs? yes.
• How does content get put into registry? Each registry developer/manager has its own policy. May include peer review, metadata check, etc.
• Health sciences online does bring content together - they screen it, too.
• DoD does not have direct input into registry management policies of individual services. They are more concerned with the metadata than the content.
• In healthcare, some content gets dated quickly. Could there be a way to identify outdated content? Should there be rules around shelf life?
• Spider won't have all the metadata tagging in the original databases. In travel, sidestep is able to search databases on the back end, an API that can connect to source databases.
• HSO creates its own metadata as well and spiders all the text.Direct access to original metadata would be useful, too.
• Open archives initiative is one specification for gathering metadata from registries.

Use cases

• If designers are going to registries and looking for content, need to make sure the discovery process is efficient.
• Literacy - can be hard to find something in simple language.
• Pub med can cross reference. That would be useful.
• Could be used for government compliance, existing materials could be used. Find training developed by others.
• Faculty members want to build on what others have done. Creative commons share and share alike is important.
• Teaching methods could be added as a subset. Ron Harden's talk about what makes a good e-learning teacher is a great example. Materials demonstrating newer approaches would be useful. Instructional strategies.
• Would be useful to get a sense of wht you've got. And what is not there.
• Exposure - educators want to know how exposed an image is, how do you track that?
• HIPPA - if graphics are medically related. What are the potential problems?
• Not all content will be online. Especially if sensitive. You may restrict sharing to certain entities. In many cases there is contact information about the restrictions.
• Can let the registry deal with access and authorization issues.
• We may have classes of content.
• Lots of content adn assets, but they are in silos. A registry would facilitate sharing and not duplication. Also distribution.
• A national registry of CE - we are struggling for resources and reinventing the wheel. A registry could address those problems.
• What happens when you find something and want to modify?
• Dynamic delivery of content, intelligent tutoring.
• peer reviewed site with nodes for learning, experts in each node. Like a review article that lives for 2 years. Signal transduction knowledge environment (STKE in Science)
• Important to share resources.
  
  Discussion questions:

1. What forces if any are driving us towards a network of content repositories for healthcare education?
2. What are the barriers to implementing such an infrastructure?
3. Is there readiness in the healthcare education community for such an approach?

If there are specific ideas you would like to discuss at the Unconference on May 14, 2008, enter them here, indicating your name and institution. Ideas from the conference will be captured on this web page. Images and other items to support your content may be uploaded as an attachment to this page as well.

To contribute an idea, click Add a comment below. If you would like to contribute an image, contact info@medbiq.org.