International Physician Update

Communication Across Borders: The GlobalAccess Lectures

Randy Brown, director of the Minimally Invasive Surgical Training Center (MISTC), delivers a lecture on robotic surgery.

 What’s a doctor’s greatest challenge? The answer likely is keeping up with the dizzying pace of new information. But how does a physician keep current? There are expensive journals and medical conferences, but that can get very expensive for individual clinicians.

But, now, at most institutions, there’s videoconferencing, which can instantly connect doctors, nurses and hospital administrators to colleagues around the world.

Nayzak Raoof, M.D., chairman of the education committee at the American Hospital in Dubai, knew about the value of teleconferencing, and he was bound and determined to bring the latest knowledge in surgery, cardiology and other specialties to colleagues in the United Arab Emirates. He conceived a series of six monthly lectures delivered live by Johns Hopkins faculty members using videoconferencing technology.

Part of the GlobalAccess Lectures organized by Johns Hopkins International, the one-hour talks focused on the use of mechanical ventilation in ARDS, management of diabetes in cardiac patients and an update on management of Barrett’s esophagus. They also included lively discussions among physicians, one of the most popular aspects of this technology.

In another example of the value of videoconferencing, members of the
Hopkins head and neck surgery department provided a live surgical demonstration to the annual meeting of the Mexico Otolaryngology Society in Cancún, transmitted directly from Hopkins’ Minimally Invasive Surgical Training Center.

“The experience of telemedicine that we had with Hopkins is very useful, innovative and interesting,” comments Raoof. “We had about 75 people in a room that normally held 60. The lecture (by Roy Brower, M.D., medical director of the Hopkins Medical Intensive Care Unit) was superb and so were the transmission and the discussion.”

The GlobalAccess Lectures is the brainchild of Alex Nason, senior manager for telehealth at Hopkins, who has spent the past five years developing the tools that can bring together physicians like Raoof with their Hopkins colleagues.

“I think many people don’t realize how simple it really is. Often, what is required is nothing more than a reliable connection and a videoconferencing unit.”

The technology is especially useful in sharing information in fields that are undergoing rapid change, such as AIDS research and clinical care. Led by infectious disease specialist Robert Bollinger, faculty from Hopkins’ AIDS service and the National AIDS Research Institute (NARI) will participate in four two-hour sessions to train clinicians in India working in anti-retroviral therapy trials. “This is a great opportunity for Hopkins and NARI to demostrate an effective new clinical training program to support NIH-sponsored clinical trials. This will all be done through video conferencing.”

To help colleagues at Hopkins and abroad stay abreast of new developments in the field, Nason has created a website at www.hopkinstelemedicine.com that also includes a list of topics in clinical specialties, hospital administration, quality and patient safety, and nursing.