Computer-supported collaborative work systems and communication services in healthcare

Abstract

This paper aims to present the next step of our research on empowering the IPOEE-MED collaborative environment. This is a learning environment developed to facilitate a professor's role while providing medical education to medical students through collaborative settings. Here, we extend its features in order that it can enrich the professor-to-student collaboration with real cases as they apply their knowledge in hospital departments. We call it 'IPOEE-MED plus' as it maintains the main features of our initial web-based tool, adding valuable modules and addressing it to a broader usage. It combines both educational and health-protective purposes in a cost-effective way. The estimated benefits concern all visible and invisible poles of collaboration as the empowered tool we propose can enrich the learning content as well as the in-time evaluation of the learning process. The latter advances a new practice for effective medical treatment by the graduate students while enhancing important theoretical issues of case-based learning.