JMIR Medical Education

Project ECHO is an innovative program that uses videoconferencing technology to connect healthcare providers with experts. The model has been successful in reaching healthcare providers in rural and underserved areas and positively impacting clinical practice. ECHO Idaho, a replication partner, has developed programming that has increased knowledge and confidence of healthcare professionals throughout the state of Idaho. Although the ECHO model has a demonstrated ability to recruit, educate, and train healthcare providers, barriers to attending Project ECHO continuing education (CE) programs remain. The asynchronous nature of podcasts could be used as an innovative medium to help address barriers to CE access that healthcare professionals face. The ECHO Idaho “Something for the Pain” podcast was developed to increase CE accessibility to rural and frontier providers, while upscaling their knowledge of and competence to treat and assess substance use disorders, pain, and behavioral health conditions.

The Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-4) is a large language model (LLM) trained and fine-tuned on an extensive dataset. After the public release of its predecessor in November 2022, the use of LLMs has seen a significant spike in interest, and a multitude of potential use cases have been proposed. In parallel, however, important limitations have been outlined. Particularly, current LLM encounters limitations, especially in symbolic representation and accessing contemporary data. The recent version of GPT-4, alongside newly released plugin features, has been introduced to mitigate some of these limitations.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI), notably Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), into medical education, has shown promising results in various medical fields. Nevertheless, its efficacy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) examinations remains understudied.

Healthcare practitioners use Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) as an aid in the crucial task of clinical reasoning and decision making. Traditional CDSS are Online Repositories (OR) and Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG). Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have emerged as potential alternatives. They have proven to be powerful innovative tools, yet they are not devoid of worrisome risks.

Student feedback is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of institutions. However, implementing feedback can be challenging due to practical difficulties. While student feedback on courses can improve teaching, there is debate about its effectiveness if not well-written to provide helpful information to the receiver.

Background: Tele-nursing has become prevalent in providing care to diverse populations suffering from different health conditions both in Israel and globally. The nurse-patient relationship aims to improve the condition of individuals requiring health services.

Although technology is rapidly advancing in immersive virtual reality (VR) simulation, there is a paucity of literature to guide its implementation into health professions education, and there are no described best practices for the development of this evolving technology.

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) presents novel approaches to enhance motivation, curriculum structure and development, and learning and retrieval processes for both learners and instructors. Though a focus for this emerging technology is academic misconduct, we sought to leverage GAI in curriculum structure to facilitate educational outcomes. For instructors, GAI offers new opportunities in course design and management while reducing time requirements to evaluate outcomes and personalizing learner feedback. These include innovative instructional designs such as flipped classrooms and gamification, enriching teaching methodologies with focused and interactive approaches, and team-based exercise development, among others. For learners, GAI offers unprecedented self-directed learning opportunities, improved cognitive engagement, and effective retrieval practices, leading to enhanced autonomy, motivation, and knowledge retention. Though empowering, this evolving landscape has integration challenges and ethical considerations, including accuracy, technological evolution, loss of learner’s voice, and socio-economic disparities. Our experience demonstrates that the responsible application of GAI's in educational settings will revolutionize learning practices, making education more accessible and tailored – producing positive motivational outcomes for both learners and instructors. Thus, we argue that leveraging GAI in educational settings will improve outcomes with implications extending from primary through higher and continuing education paradigms.

Digital technologies (DTs) have profoundly impacted health care delivery globally and are increasingly used in clinical practice. Despite this, there is a scarcity of guidelines for implementing training in digital health competencies (DHC) in medical schools, especially for clinical practice. A lack of sustained integration of DHC risks creating knowledge gaps due to a limited understanding of how DT should be used in health care. Furthermore, few studies have explored reasons for this lag, both within and beyond the medical school curriculum. Current frameworks to address these barriers are often specific to individual countries or schools and focus primarily on curriculum design and delivery. A comprehensive framework is therefore required to ensure consistent implementation of DHC across various contexts and times.

Health care professionals often face challenges in providing affirming and culturally competent care to transgender, nonbinary, and intersex (TNBI) patients due to a lack of understanding and training in TNBI health care. This gap highlights the opportunity for tailored educational resources to enhance health care professionals’ interactions with TNBI individuals.