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Medical School introduces online cardiology training

The University Medical School, sponsor of the CardioVillage continuing medical education Web site, will launch a free comprehensive training curriculum for cardiologists with the Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions this semester.

The program will be available through both CardioVillage and SCAI's Web site, according to Jane Fruchtnicht, continuing medical education faculty coordinator.

"This is a special curriculum that is going to be developed, and the primary objective is to make it available to the interventional cardiology fellows," Fruchtnicht said. "It will be a curriculum that will be offered on the SCAI Web site and the CardioVillage Web site."

Curriculum Director Michael Ragosta said the curriculum content and software was designed at the University and will be released in conjunction with SCAI, the professional membership organization representing interventional cardiovascular physicians, to promote use by interventional cardiologists worldwide.

"We wanted more people to use it and the Web-based interface allows it to be used anywhere," he said. "We wanted the society to help with endorsement of it as a combined group."

According to Anne Marie Smith, SCAI's continuing medical education coordinator, offering the curriculum through the SCAI Web site will create exposure and benefit SCAI members. Credit gained from the curriculum can count toward a physicians' required licensure.

"They are offering it through SCAI because that will give them international exposure and will allow them to reach a greater interventional cardiology audience than if they just went to U.Va.," Smith said. "It was a great opportunity for SCAI to be able to offer this without having to invest the resources from scratch."

The online resource was developed to train physicians and fellows, or physicians-in-training, and has been used at the University for the past couple of years, Ragosta said.

"The current curriculum content took about a year to create," he said. "It is a fun, novel, innovative way of teaching."

This is the first comprehensive curriculum for interventional cardiologist to be offered online, Ragosta said.

"It is really just having the educational content for a trainee because there is just no one place to get it right now," he said. "This is really very unique, especially to the depth that we have it."

CardioVillage was founded in 1999 and currently offers 135 hours of free continuing medical education credit to over 8,000 registered users.

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