Surgeon Reaches 100K Medical Students With iTunes Podcasts

One of the beauties of mobile medical education is how quickly you are able to distribute multimedia content, especially if it’s free.  This is due to the ubiquitous nature of certain platforms, such as iTunes, on every iOS device — over 120 million of them.  These mobile devices have significantly lowered the barrier of entry for medical professionals wishing to reach millions of individuals.

A University of Alberta professor and surgeon, Dr. Jonathan White, decided to make 10 to 30 minute iTunes podcasts of his lecture material in order to reach his students at a different level.  His medical students feel the free Podcasts are more captivating, and enable them to consume a greater amount of content when they are short on time:

“When you’re short on time, you have the podcast to rely on in order to get the bulk of information that you need to learn,” said medical student Todd Penny……The podcasts are less dry than reading out of a textbook,” he said. “You have someone talking to you as if you are in a lecture. They try to make it a little more interesting. They add music.”

Dr. White states he has reached 120,000 individual people since starting the podcasts in 2008 on iTunes.  Whether those individuals are medical students or patients, he isn’t sure — but his content is aimed at students in the health care profession.

The podcasts themselves are informative, concise, and even entertaining.  They are divided into chapters, enabling you to listen to only the portions you want, such as treatment or etiology.  While listening to the short podcasts won’t make you an expert in the particular disease pathology, they are definitely at the level of a medical student, and possibly an intern.

They cover subjects ranging from GI, such as Diverticular Disease, to Cardiology, such as Aortic Dissections.  Overall, the podcasts are extremely easy to download to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and are a great form of mobile medical education.  If you don’t have an iOS device, you can listen to them via iTunes and the Surgery101 website.

The Podcast usually occurs on a weekly basis, and there are currently over 35 episodes thus far.  We encourage our readers to check out Dr. White’s website, and to subscribe to his podcast.

Website: Sugery101.org

iTunes Surgery 101 Podcast link

Source: CBC News

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*


You may also like these posts

WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.