Abstract
Purpose: :
Direct communication between primary investigators and community clinicians is largely limited to meetings. A means was sought to establish asynchronous communication between visual science investigators and clinicians by employing RSS–feed mediated mp3 distribution (podcast) and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).
Methods: :
37 visual science investigators (33 ophthalmologists, 3 epidemiologists, 1 medical resident) were enrolled over an 8 month period. Each investigator had published manuscripts in peer–reviewed journals within the preceding 3 months or had manuscripts in–press at the time of enrollment. An additional 5 leading clinicians were enrolled. Each was recorded (7 on site and 35 remotely) describing his or her respective study (or clinical information in the case of the 5 clinicians). The recordings were redacted in a manner recognizable to community clinicians and distributed weekly without charge by podcast. Two VoIP lines were established, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom, to provide an asynchronous means for community clinicians to ask questions of the visual science investigators. These questions and the subsequent answers by the visual science investigators were distributed over the same RSS feed by incorporation into the following podcast.
Results: :
AsSeenFromHere.com has recorded 16,760 RSS–mediated mp3 downloads with an average of 408 unique user downloads per weekly podcast over the 8 month study period. Two inquiries were received over VoIP and were successfully mated to responses from the respective visual science investigators and included in subsequent podcasts.
Conclusions: :
Podcasting is an excellent means of communicating research findings. The podcast model for the dissemination of scientific information employed by AsSeenFromHere.com has proved so successful that the New York University School of Medicine has adopted it as a mechanism for continuing medical education (CME).
Keywords: learning • training/teaching cataract surgery