Evaluation of an Online Telemedicine Course Through Facebook

Summary

Health professionals with adequate training are required to provide quality remote care. There are few telemedicine and telehealth training programs for doctors and medical students. On the other hand, the use of social networks (Facebook and Twitter) as a medical education tool is becoming frequent. However, there is a lack of conclusive evidence in terms of its effectiveness. The objective of the present study is to develop and evaluate a telemedicine course for resident doctors through Facebook and compare it with one through Moodle. A randomized, triple-blind, parallel block controlled trial will be conducted that tests the effectiveness of an educational intervention through Facebook compared to another control intervention using Moodle. Intervention training is a telemedicine course focused on teleconsultation provided through Facebook. Control training is the same educational content but through Moodle. The level of telemedicine knowledge of the participants before and after the intervention will be evaluated. The inferential analysis to see the association between the variables of interest will be carried out by Student's T tests or analysis of variance (ANOVA). If potential confounding factors were found, the variable will be adjusted through linear regression. The pre and post intervention analysis will be carried out with student t or wilcoxon rank test according to the normality of the data. Resident doctors who receive the telemedicine course through Facebook are expected to have a greater knowledge gain than those who take the course through Moodle.

Conditions

• Telemedicine
• Training

Interventions

OTHER

Facebook intervention

The intervention consists of the content of the course on telemedicine through a "closed group" of Facebook according to the established syllabus whose educational material is video classes, discussion forums and online questionnaires. The duration of the course will be 5 weeks, each week two classes will be uploaded to the Facebook platform in succession until the course is completed. So that the student can visualize the content progressively and continuously.

OTHER

Control Training:

In this group the participants are exposed to the same course content and perform similar activities as the intervention group on Facebook during the same period but on the Moodle educational platform. The Moodle platform was chosen because it has been widely used in several institutions, with a large user community worldwide, with approximately 50,000 registrations in more than 200 countries and due to the many easy-to-use educational tools it offers. So it is one of the educational platforms that has demonstrated its efficiency in the medical educational field.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Cender U Quispe Juli, MD · Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

TRIPLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-11-25

Primary Completion

2020-02-27

Completion

2020-08-29

Countries

• Peru

Study Locations