PRACTICE MANAGEMENT Help Desk

Eye Site Instructs

■ Jonathan D. Trobe, M.D., professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says he created the Web site, The Eyes Have It, to rectify a major weakness he saw in educating medical personnel about eye care. "It has become increasingly difficult to give people who are being trained in these academic medical centers — nurses, ophthalmic technicians, optometrists — clinical exposure because their time is very tight," he explains. "There's no guarantee they are going to see a spectrum of the conditions that they have to see in order to be competent at taking care of eye problems the way a non-ophthalmologist does. And a lot of eye problems are initially triaged by people who are not ophthalmologists."

Dr. Trobe says he based his selection of instructional material on input from pediatricians, emergency physicians and internists, who told him what they most needed to know about eyes and vision. He modeled the Web site on a CD prototype that he had taken to the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians for several years. In the learning laboratory at these meetings, he watched as physicians worked through the CD. He noticed that they typically preferred to learn by trying to solve problem cases rather than by simply reading instructional material.

Accordingly, he designed the teaching module so that users could click back and forth between problem cases and the instructional material needed to solve them. On the Web site, users have the option of going directly to the problem cases. They can select an answer from the multiple choice options and are immediately told if they are correct. If users decide they need more information before selecting an answer, they click on a "Review" button that will take them to the relevant material on the instruction mode, which has 11 sections and approximately 32 videos and animations. Visitors then have another opportunity to answer the question. The site automatically scores the quiz. Medical personnel can show their test results to a supervisor. "we use it for all our medical students and even our first-year residents in ophthalmology," Dr. Trobe says.

The Eyes Have It is available through the Web sites of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (www.aao.org/theeyeshavit/index/cfm) and the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center (www.kellogg.umich.edu/theeyeshaveit). OM