Development of a web-based platform for e-training in echocardiography

Background: Echocardiography is widely used for the diagnosis and management of heart conditions, as it is non-invasive, low-cost and transportable. However, its images interpretation requires an expert, skilled operator in this field. Thus, health practitioners should meet a consensus to avoid misinterpretation, but the opportunities to train and update their skills are often lacking. The aid of technological advances in such cases is warmly welcome, especially concerning internet and Web 2.0 technologies, representing a useful add-on to current training methods for practitioners. This work aimed to develop an 'e-training' platform for health practitioners, to improve effectiveness in the clinical interpretation of medical, mainly echocardiographic, images. The setting up of a worldwide community of expert practitioners on this topic is also foreseen. Methods: The platform is composed of a web-based version, while a mobile app is foreseen, allowing the practitioners to log in through their credentials used for social networks (Googleþ, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.). The architecture was chosen to get the platform ready to be included in a federation for digital identities, supporting the single sign on (SSO with SAML), allowing all users to use a single username and password for all services within a federation. The e-training method is based on the Web 2.0 principles, as it relies on the involvement of as many practitioners as possible, in order to share clinical cases with the professional community and to put their knowledge at disposal for peer-comparison with other healthcare specialists. In particular, participants perform measures and interpretations of anonymised echocardiographic images, by on-line periodic exercises on transthoracic echocardiography, stress echocardiography and congenital heart disease. Their answers are next compared, in on-line reports, with those obtained by the other participants. Results: To date, 107 skilled professionals are registered, and five clinical cases have been developed for each platform programme. Preliminary evidence already displayed a heterogeneity in image interpretation, proving the usefulness of such an approach for health professionals' training. Remote training programmes could reduce the misinterpretation of medical images and improve skills of participants, allowed to enter a healthcare professionals' network for peer-discussion and comparison on medical imaging. Conclusion: Despite the small audience reached to date, although mainly composed of skilled medical professionals, we expect to receive a larger amount of subscriptions in the near future through our wide dissemination schedule. We think that this approach, given the good success of remote training applications in medicine, could form the basis for future add-ons in healthcare personnel formation.