Next-Generation Surgery Education Platform

A new educational platform uses a content-rich medical website to create a complete resource for surgical training.

The AccessSurgery website, built on the customizable Silverchair Content Manager (SCM) platform, integrates respected surgery textbooks with surgical videos to create a complete resource for surgical training. The information architecture was designed to accomplish the goals of the core curriculum for residents in general surgery, an ongoing national effort to provide a consistent framework for general surgery education supported by the American Board of Surgery and the American College of Surgeons, among other key surgical organizations in the United States.

AccessSurgery users may acquire knowledge of key surgical techniques by reading from Schwartz's Principles of Surgery, viewing thousands of illustrations, including those from Zollinger's Atlas of Surgery Operations, and watching videos and animations. Surgery residents may quiz themselves by creating board-review tests, the results of which may be e-mailed to residency program directors. The website includes other practical features such as a regularly updated drug database, a differential diagnosis tool, and quick access diagnosis and treatment guidance for over 360 diseases.

"AccessSurgery is an excellent example of the flexibility of SCM and the power of semantic technology,” said Thane Kerner, president and CEO of Silverchair (Charlottesville, VA, USA), developers of the SCM platform. "The topic-based semantic tagging provides the architecture of meaningful connections within the information so that the content is always available in the right context for the surgeon.”

"The technical infrastructure needed to deliver a high-quality interactive surgery training environment online has now developed,” explained Scott Grillo, vice president for digital product development at McGraw-Hill Professional (New York, NY, USA), which supplies the content to the website. "The time is right to combine our broad range of surgery content with Silverchair's industry-leading platform, because we have a unique opportunity to take surgical education to its next generation.”



Related Links:
AccessSurgergery
Silverchair
McGraw-Hill Professional