The Office of Alternative Medicine at NIH recommends that all healthcare professionals and students be exposed to alternative theories and techniques of primary care so that they can assist patients in becoming active in their healing process. We propose to develop a comprehensive medical resource for physicians on Complementary & Alternative Therapies for Cancer. This resource will consist of CME courses for Physicians and Practioners, a customized syllabus program and Discussion Forums, which will be distributed in internet and CD-ROM/DVD formats to facilitate distance learning. A resource will be developed for the physician and medical professionals, based on research from nationally recognized experts. Our Phase I objectives are to study the feasibility of developing the physician resource, and to develop and test an internet web site prototype of one module through interviews with physicians and medical professionals. In Phase II, we will develop the full courseware for all C&A Therapies for the web site and the CD-ROM/DVD products based on Phase I results. Effectiveness of the two phases will be measured through online testing/scoring, extensive user traffic analysis reports and interviews with physicians and medical professionals. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: The complementary & alternative resources products and content produced from this grant can be sold, promoted, or licensed through outlets such as; medical clinics, wellness clinics, healthcare organizations, catalog distributors, and other not yet identified professional outlets. Additional revenue can be generated through web links, web registration, and corporate sponsorship of CME courses. Successful testing of the program will lead to the next step, the delivery of a product designed to serve up custom information based upon the students current knowledge of the subject matter. This has significant implications for the medical education market. Why should professionals need to review materials with which they are already familiar? Why should healthcare practitioners need to watch 10 minutes of video to arrive at the 7 minutes in which they have interest? The next step for this product will be to continue the expansion of the software instruction set with the goal of producing a "shrink-wrap" product. This product will allow the user to customize his/her syllabus so that each student is able to learn at his/her own speed.
Thesaurus Terms: Internet, alternative medicine, cancer information system, cancer registry /resource, computer system design /evaluation, continuing education, education evaluation /planning, neoplasm /cancer therapy comprehensive care clinical research, human subject, interview
