Paper on Continuing Medical Education through mobile devices for Health Care Workers in Developing Countries

At the end of this month I will be attending IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE MOBILE LEARNING 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. It runs from 26 to 28 February 2009.

For this conference my colleagues and I have written a paper on Continuing Medical Education via mobile forhealth care workers in developing countries.

This paper focuses on delivering mobile continuing medical education (CME) to health care workers (HCWs) in developing countries. Delivering mobile content to remote areas in low resource settings is a technical challenge. However the need to transmit the latest knowledge on Anti Retroviral Therapy (ART) is crucial for HCWs involved in HIV/AIDS care in high burden areas.
Through the development of accessible and standardized mobile content on ART we can reach many more HCWs in the field. Although standardization of mobile content is only in its infancy, we have applied the guidelines for mobile content development of the Mobile Web Initiative. This has resulted in increased accessibility of the CME modules, minimalized download size of the content and enabled us to reach as many different mobile cell phones as possible. The cost of downloading content and enabling cheaper cell phones to connect to the CME modules were crucial in opening up the CME modules for HCWs in developing countries. In addition to this approach, we have been developing mobile multimedia content as well, anticipating future mobile applications in developing countries.
Because the CME modules were integrated in a bigger educational portal, it had and has a beneficial result on the combined knowledge exchange of that portal. Mobile CME modules also contribute to the body of knowledge sharing and capacity building in developing countr

The complete program of IADIS 2009 has not been revealed yet.

*Keynote Speakers in IADIS:
Professor Angela McFarlane, Director of Content and Learning at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK Professor Hiroaki Ogata, Dept. of Information Science and Intelligent Systems, University of Tokushima, Japan

If you have any comments or suggestions or questions on the paper, feel free to contact me.