Martin Rydmark, MD, PhD.
Mednet (The Computer Laboratory of the Medical Faculty), Göteborg University

The role of academy is to produce knowledge through research, manage and distribute it in education, all for the benefit of health care. Traditionally, the academic teachers digest information according to their own tempo and serve it to students in text books and lectures. A considerable time lapse and a likely distortion of textual and numerical facts from the source to the recipient occurs. With regard to image information, earlier media techniques employed simplified graphics often in the hands of "artists". Nowadays, demands on correct and immediate evidence based information must force those in the medical multimedia field to certify our products and update the information we submit on our distribution media. Obviously, only by web-distribution can this be achieved. Otherwise, a "best before date" label must be used on CD-distributed media, and other static media.

The administration of certification and up-dating of educational media, as well as the incorporation of new research based information, is a challenge to all commercial media producers/distributors and to the academy/universities. On a small scale, we at Mednet, during a period of 10-15 years, have achieved experience of incorporating our own basic science results in neuroscience into distributed educational media for our medical students. For visualization purposes we now use web-distributed VR and are investigating haptics for perception of sensory qualities. Our view is that this quality assurance procedure demands a great deal of effort and co-operation and hard to achieve at the institution level, but must be organized at the level of an university organization or a network of universities. You might even discuss the enrolment of governmental or international levels for co-ordination.

In this discussion anyone with long time experience as well as beginners in production of medical multimedia will have a forum to exchange ideas. Faculty staff responsible for education and administrators must contribute to the organization of quality assurance and researchers must find ways of quickly and adequately distributing their results not only to scientific journals but also to the students.

Martin Rydmark, MD, PhD, Associate Professor,
Director and Chairman of MEDNET
Mednet
Box 417
SE405 30 G÷TEBORG (SWEDEN)
Phone: +46 31 773 3762
Fax: +46 31 773 3758
Email: martin.rydmark@mednet.gu.se
Website: http://www.mice.gu.se