Syllabus for First Web2.0 Course for Med Students

This may be a first. Healthcare and med student blogger Berci Mesko over at Scienceroll will be teaching a course on Web2.0 for medical students at the University of Debrecen in Hungary next semester.

Berci has been kind enough to provide the planned syllabus for the 10 week course and in true Web2.0 fashion, will share class slides and YouTube videos online in the future.

Looks like an interesting course overall. My only quibble, which I relayed to Berci, is that he has completely skipped the impact of Web2.0 technologies on the consumer and subsequent impact on the physician-consumer relationship.

Increasingly, physicians will need to work with consumers who come to visits with information they have gleaned off the Internet, either through chats, searches, communities or even YouTube. This will have an increasingly dramatic impact on how physicians engage with their customers that med students today need to plan for. Unfortunately, from what I have seen to date, little of this is actually being taught in most med schools, but please correct me if I am wrong.

Why should physicians care?

Well, at the TEPR conference last week the CEO of a small EMR vendor and former senior researcher at the National Cancer Research Institute stated that in San Francisco some physicians are actually moving their practices to Oakland to avoid having to deal with Internet-savvy customers. This may be a solution in the short-term, but ten years from now that will not be an option. Might as well begin getting the next generation of doctors ready, which really should not be all that hard as they are the iGeneration.

And for those who may have been in Bhutan for the last several years getting in touch with their inner selves, this is a brief description of the iGeneration in text format or we can get all Web2.0 on you and point to YouTube. (Note, after about 2 minutes, not much else in this clip)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLBN084gFA&hl=en]