Innovation regulation – are androids dreaming of electric sheep
Should medical innovations be regulated, and if so, by whom? The advent of the digital age has afforded multiple opportunities for innovation in clinical education. This has accelerated as a natural consequence of digitization of educational content, and more recently by the opportunities afforded by the enforced need for remote learning. Multiple resources exist and could be classified as web-based (through a web-browser), mobile device-based (smart-phone technology) or a hybrid of both. Further classification may be considered: open access social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where articles, ideas, guidelines are disseminated and discussed at various levels of curation; ‘closed’ educational resources, usually curated and requiring some form of payment to facilitate their quality assurance. Younger medical learners seem to be drawn to the former for reasons of cost and ease of access; my personal experience of the latter is very much a word-of-mouth affair – I am prepared to pay for a resource I know, for sure, is well managed.
Open access resources such as applications on mobile devices are either free or subscription based. Of interest is that a recent independent review of over 4000 such resources found very poor quality-control in terms of source-referencing, being kept updated, or having any input at all after ‘launch’. One could argue that, for ‘free’ references, this is a built-in redundancy based on either lack of ongoing interest by a busy healthcare innovator or based on lack of financial return for a commercially driven innovator. However, an evident apartheid is introduced (again) between the haves and the have-nots. One approach to this is an (innovative!) approach by the German Digital Authorizing Body, that combines the ‘prescribing’ of apps as a commercial enterprise but dependent on stringent quality measures. It would be interesting to see if a similar approach could be used for educational initiatives.
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Interesting. I’ve noticed a space emerging where a commercial enterprise uses academic capital (in the form of respected contacts who have promoted work via that enterprise’s web space) to encourage respected academics to publish there. It seems likely to me that the complexity of this issue you’ve raised will keep on increasing, so perhaps no matter what regulatory processes we impose, we will all also need to work on information literacy?