MedSchoolTV experiments with Internet broadcasting for medical information

The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto is transforming Instructional television (ITV) into a free web-based broadcasting service that is experimenting with new advertising models, new formats and new technologies to find out how people use ITV and why. It’s also demonstrating how universities and other institutions can create new distribution windows for their proprietary video content. MedSchoolTV touts itself as a web-based video-on-demand broadcast channel—“Think of PBS-meets-medical-education”—that delivers current affairs and interview-style programs on a wide range of health and medical topics. Its goals are multi-pronged, says Dr. Avi Hyman, director of academic technology from the faculty of medicine: part educational tool, part public service and part pedagogical experiment. “MedSchoolTV is also a research project, created to answer the question of what people are watching online, how they are watching it and why,” Hyman tells Canadian New Media. “Being a new media and technology group in a university, we said that (ITV) is a massive wave and we wanted to initiate a research project to find out how people are using it, why people using it, what types of formats are people attracted to and in what type of circumstances.” Launched in the summer of 2007, MedSchoolTV hosts hundreds of medical and health professional videos; from items on mental disorders to interviews with medical pioneers and web-programs on health issues. In addition to digitizing the university’s vast collection of films and videos—some dating back more than 30 years—MedSchoolTV will also create new content, as well as act as a host for instructors and students who want to experiment with producing their own videos for public broadcast. This online laboratory also features several experimental advertisers and sponsors. Commercial sites often feature short video clips and favor banner and sponsored commercials embedded before or after a clip, but these methods may not be best suited for health promotion and medical information. “The question is how do you produce health-related materials in a way that engages viewers and in what circumstances? We want to know which particular format works best for certain groups,” says Hyman. “One of the challenges for us is getting formats that are usable across the board. A lot of people in our community work in clinical settings and clinical settings tend to have a lot of firewalls and locked down networks for patients’ cases and privacy protection and all the rest. These are perfectly legitimate reasons, but when you lock down a network, you are often preventing certain types of media formats from being used,” he explains. “There’s no uniformity from hospital to hospital in terms of what their IT departments allow and don’t allow. Nor is there a mechanism for delivering the material that is universally acceptable.” To this end, the group is experimenting with different technologies, such as ePressence, Flash and progressive streaming. Medical streaming a growing trend Health care professionals are increasingly trying to use the Internet as a means of delivering free information and diagnostics to Canadians. Similar services are offered through McGill University and the University of California. As well, the Ontario Telemedicine Network uses video-conferencing and tele-diagnostic tools to deliver clinical care and professional education among health care providers and patients. OTN sees 2,600 patients and provides 450 educational events per month. MedSchoolTV offers the public a wide array of videos from the University of Toronto’s collection, ranging in topics from mental disorders and cancer to live-to-tape videos of surgical procedures. Specific videos not yet available on the site can also be requested through an online form. “We started MedSchoolTV in part to digitize some of the work that people had done under our former banner of Instructional Media Services some 30 years ago,” explains Hyman. “A lot of the historical materials are unbelievable … it would be a shame for these materials to be taken out of the public place simply because they were on reel-to-reel film and not online.” There are potentially thousands of interviews, mini documentaries and programs that await digitization in the university’s collection. “In some of the cases the films were only available in 16 mm format, in original reel-to-reel format. We’ve had to use and experiment with some interesting technologies in order to digitize those,” adds Hyman. “It’s a pedagogical experiment that I hope never ends. I’m hoping that MedSchoolTV, as an environment, will not just be an experiment, but rather, a laboratory where we can see how new media works with the delivery of education and with the delivery of health care education in particular.”

MedSchoolTV experiments with Internet broadcasting for medical information

Broadcast | February 23, 2009

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