Background: Ideal Continuing Education?

Most clinicians would value a continuing education experience that provides for effective, efficient, and enjoyable learning. The ideal CME (continuing medical education) or CNE (continuing nurse education) experience would probably involve a visit to a major medical center, with opportunities to see patients, interact with experts (in the best case, a mentor), attend excellent lectures, etc., all of which would be available as desired, ie, on demand. But this kind of ideal learning experience isn't available to most practitioners; they're difficult, if not impossible, to conduct on a regular basis, much less "on demand." Further, good learning depends on having good teaching cases and good teachers, the availability and quality of which is, to say the least, unpredictable. For most chronic diseases, it's impossible, in the short duration of a typical CME or CNE experience, to get first-hand sense of longitudinal care, the long-term physical and emotional impact of a disease on individual patients. Even when good educational experiences are available, attending them usually involves significant expense and inconvenience to the practitioner.

Virtual Mini-fellowships™ seek to overcome these obstacles and to provide as close to an ideal continuing education experience as technology will allow. This program, dealing with HIV and AIDS,

• is available to you on demand, at any time or place, at a reasonable cost;
• applies sound pedagogy and learning theory in a carefully-designed, well-produced, comprehensive program of instruction;
• provides a mentor who is a recognized expert, "personally" guiding you and providing "individualized" feedback and case discussions;
• provides a simulated teaching case that compresses time, giving the experience, in the course of several encounters, of counseling, evaluating, and managing a "patient" over several years;
• allows you to "interview" real patients with HIV disease, providing a deeply humanistic view of this illness from the patient's perspective;
• provides detailed and insightful case discussions, in context with each simulated patient encounter, covering a broad range of bread-and-butter management topics;
• offers "mini-lectures" given by two experts in HIV care, a physician and a nurse, providing grounding in facts and principles of HIV care;
• provides additional, computer-based activities that allow you to learn concepts related to HIV infection and its management in more active, experiential ways.

These qualities are provided within a Virtual Clinic, a highly detailed, computer-generated environment that is intuitive and easy to use. We're convinced that you'll find this mini-fellowship to be a unique, informative, efficient, and highly enjoyable way to learn!