Distributed Medical Training for Force Mobilization and Disaster Response

This SBIR application proposes to develop, evaluate, and implement Internet-based continuing education in trauma care to train physicians and other health professionals without specific trauma expertise. The courses will be available via the Internet and will utilize interactive clinical scenarios to disseminate knowledge. Online information resources and discussion capability will accompany each course. The curriculum development will be based on reviews of existing trauma care curriculum guidelines, surveys of the skills and needs of physicians in non-trauma specialties, and revised by trauma specialists and military physicians. This curriculum will provide physicians and other health professionals with training that will enable them to transfer the skills and knowledge they acquire from our interactive training scenarios to new situations. The course design will support this goal by applying the principles of cognitive flexibility theory, which seeks to address issues of advanced knowledge acquisition. Cognitive flexibility theory is especially useful when the knowledge to be acquired is nonlinear, complex, and integrated, such as medical training.