Building future medical education environments over ATM networks

Abstract

The educational requirements of our society are changing. It is no longer sufficient to obtain an education at a single point in time and be done; rather, education must be a lifelong process to allow people, particularly those in technical diciplines, to keep up with their constantly changing fields. This is especially true with medical education, as exemplified by the continued training of radiology residents. It has been difficult to provide this training to physicians and other health care practitioners who are spread over a wide geographical area and who cannot travel away from their communities for lenghty training sessions. To meet the needs of this expanding base of students, it is necessary to go beyond the traditional campus setting and bring education to the students.