Learning System for Continuous Professional Education in Low Vision Rehabilitatio

Emerald Education Systems has developed an online continuing professional education learning system that targets low vision rehabilitation service providers. This CE learning system has three components: 1) a set of coordinated in depth online courses that provide a broad and deep foundation of knowledge on low vision rehabilitation that is delivered using a didactic approach at a learner-controlled pace; 2) an online telementoring system that transmits live video and audio of a mentee working with a low vision patient in a clinical setting to a mentor who remotely monitors and guides the mentee; and 3) a web-based multidisciplinary learning community that enables low vision rehabilitation professionals to interact through threaded forums and live chat, produce and publicly comment on posted clinical cases and issue-related articles, and share resources with colleagues. The presently proposed Phase I STTR has the aim of transferring low vision patient survey, data entry, data analysis, and reporting algorithms from Johns Hopkins low vision rehabilitation researchers to EES to develop a fourth component of the CE learning system. This fourth component will audit participating clinicians' practices with low vision patients, provide feedback on the clinician's individual patient outcomes, and benchmark their outcomes against those of their peers and those published in the clinical research literature. The first aim is to develop and optimize an adaptive computer-assisted patient survey that administers the Activity Inventory over the internet and estimates six functional ability measures on an interval scale for each patient. The second aim is to develop an online patient state survey and online clinical and practice data entry system, which together with the AI survey data and estimated functional ability measures, will create and store a multidimensional data hypercube for each clinician. The third aim is to develop a standardized report of patient data collected by and stored in the EES server that can be downloaded by the clinician and added to the patient's records. The fourth aim is to develop an online analytical processing system that will enable the clinician to monitor outcomes, explore and slice the datacube for his or her patients, perform patient subgroup analyses of outcomes, and compare summarized outcomes to the data of his or her peers or to metadata from published studies. The goal of Phase I is to develop functional prototypes of these system components using well-developed open-source system components under a general public license. Phase II will develop an alpha prototype that will be integrated with the CE learning community content management system and conduct a research project to determine if the CE learning system with audit/feedback/benchmarking leads to changes in practices that result in improved patient outcomes.