SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 10, 2014) - NextGenU.org, the world's first portal to free, accredited higher education, and ReelDx, the leading hosting platform for creating and sharing HIPAA-compliant clinical video, today announced at the TEDMED 2014 conference a partnership to support NextGenU's family practice residency program in Sudan. ReelDx will provide its cloud-based platform to enable Sudanese family medicine residents to create video case studies that will be peer reviewed and shared via ReelDx's medical education application.
Physician shortages are a global problem. The World Health Organization estimates a shortage of 4.3 million physicians, nurses and other health workers worldwide, especially in many developing countries. The issue is particularly acute in civil war-scarred Sudan and neighboring South Sudan, where millions are forced to rely on inadequately trained or low-skilled health workers, especially in rural areas. Hospitals are often overcrowded, infant mortality rates often high and, at less than 62 years, life expectancy is low.
To help address the issue, the government-backed Sudanese Family Medicine Residency aims to dramatically increase the number of family medicine doctors who practice in Sudan. When the program started, there were 10 family medicine doctors in the country, which has a population of about 35 million. This program expects to train an additional 10,000 doctors in five years' time. NextGenU is providing its online educational platform to bring residents a distributed and high-quality curriculum.
"We had been looking for a way to empower residents to create and share case studies," said Dr. Erica Frank, Founder and President of NextGenU. "When we saw the ReelDx platform, we realized this was a fabulous way to go. It takes advantage of video capabilities in the hands of the residents, online distribution (a fundamental principle of NextGenU), and a structured peer review process to ensure the highest-quality finished product."
The Sudanese Family Medicine Residency pilot program began in 2013. Residents will begin creating video case studies on ReelDx immediately. The NextGenU-ReelDx partnership is expected to produce over 250,000 video case studies over the next five years. These cases will dramatically increase the efficiency of the residency program by exposing residents to a wide variety of clinical situations, and the cases will become a valuable source of data about the status and practice of health and medicine in Sudan.
Once the program is successful in this first implementation, NextGenU and ReelDx plan to make it available to other similar programs throughout the world.