Why Text Messaging in Healthcare? What About in Medical Education?

Imagine for a second, connecting every mobile phone that are in the hands of healthcare providers. What would you do with this network? Text messaging enables a type of connectivity in healthcare that provides unfathomable opportunities.

Now imagine messaging in the medical education/CME space where you TRULY have an exclusive two-way channel, to engage, educate and assess the impact of your activities. A channel that can be used to coordinate care of patients and their providers, receive alerts about the latest treatment guidelines, enhance medication adherence and to access text, audio and video content on any given therapeutic topic.

But how to move from the “could” to the “should?” What can be practically applied today that will deliver real results in terms of engaging, educating and assessing from a medical education perspective?

Engaging

For starters, “engaging” is the most basic of uses of texting/SMS.  You can instantly send out messages to reach hundreds and thousands of healthcare providers to reinforce, enhance and retain knowledge.

Or you can also replace traditional ARS-based technology by using SMS-based
polling at any live or satellite event. For example, you can instantly compare polls from a series of live dinner meetings occurring simultaneously in various locations, allowing faculty and participants to see how they compare with their peers.

Educating

Here’s where the fun starts.  You can use messages to promote various types of learning, ranging from group-focused discussion, to multi-disciplinary collaboration (especially through integration with platforms such as twitter).

You can also provide branched learning opportunities to individualize the learning (kind of like those old ‘Choose your own adventure books’), allowing the learner to follow a particular management or treatment approach to its conclusion. The simplicity of the tool doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself from advanced instructional design.

And for those educational nerds among us, you can collect continuous assessment data through instantaneous SMS feedback, and revise and update your content and curriculum to address the real-time educational needs of your audience.

Assessing

What about outcomes, aka data, data, data!?!  Because of the 2-way communication, it’s possible to collect data to measure the impact of medical education activities by assessing real time formative and summative outcomes.   You can conduct pre- and post-activity outcomes, by polling participants of medical education/CME activities and assessing their change knowledge, competency and performance.

With a well-developed text-based platform provider, you should expect to access a back-end analytic dashboard to break-up the data in a number of ways, allowing you to assess changes in knowledge, skills, attitudes and even performance. Be wary of those who don’t understand the intricacies of our industry.

A dashboard like this should also allow collation of outcomes from multiple activities to really assess participants’ changes in knowledge, competencies and performance. (cough, cough, Moore, cough cough)

2digiti

As great as the above uses for text-based messaging in Medical Education are, there are NUMEROUS other ways to provide value to your healthcare audience.  Contact me. I’d be happy to show you in more detail how you can adapt and customize the platform I’ve created to address your specific needs.

vg@2digiti.com