On-line delivery of continuing medical education over the World-Wide Web: an on-line needs assessment.

Abstract

On-line continuing medical education (CME) courses offer at least two potential advantages: They are extremely convenient and relatively inexpensive. Before expanding our department's 2-year-old on-line category 1 accredited CME program, we conducted a survey to assess the need for more courses of this type and to document those topics of most interest to our responders.An on-line survey form was designed and linked to the home page of our departmental Web server. The 8-month survey asked whether responders were interested in earning category 1 CME hours, how many hours they desired, how much they were willing to pay for each hour, and which topics would interest them most. Responders were also asked to specify their medical practice and medical specialty. All responses were tabulated, and simple descriptive statistics were calculated.Our survey received 317 responses: 188 from physicians, 42 from radiology technologists, 11 from physician assistants and nurse practitioners, and the remainder from 26 othe...