JoMI joins Research4Life to bring high-quality surgical teaching videos to over 100 countries
The Journal of Medical Insight (JoMI) announced a partnership with Research4Life that will make the journal’s video articles accessible in over 100 developing countries. Research4Life will provide access to the journal through the Hinari program. This partnership will provide 5,700 eligible institutions with an educational resource critical for medical students, residents and attending physicians.
The Journal of Medical Insight seeks to mitigate the global discrepancy in patient outcomes between low-volume and high-volume hospitals and surgeons. On a population level, low-volume surgeons’ performance is inferior to that of high-volume surgeons. This trend may be exacerbated in developing countries where The World Health Organization and the Harvard School of Public Health discovered a “scarcity of surgical access in low-income settings.”* Specifically, countries that spend less than $100 per capita on healthcare annually account for 34.8% of the world’s population and only 3.5% of the world’s surgeries.
JoMI’s purpose is to increase surgeons’ intellectual and visual exposure to surgeries. The skills a high-volume surgeon gains from live surgeries are not merely fine-motor. They also gain an overall familiarity with the techniques required, possible complications and how to deal with various pathologies. JoMI provides a means for low-volume surgeons to develop these skills as a part of continuing medical education, in order to help bridge the outcomes gap. Each published article consists of a narrated video, animated visual aids, and a case write-up in order to provide physicians with a comprehensive educational experience.
Hinari’s dedication to improving public health services makes it a natural partner for JoMI. Launched in 2002 by the World Health Organization, Hinari provides public health workers, researchers and policy-makers in developing countries access to high quality, relevant and timely health information. All Research4Life programs focus on research in a different scientific field crucial to the developing world.
“We are very excited to be working with HINARI,” said Nikita Bernstein, CEO of JoMI. “We founded JoMI to improve clinical outcomes and HINARI presents a unique opportunity to deliver on our mission by facilitating access to the JoMI surgical training videos in the developing world. We film surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s, and other top hospitals, and are excited to extend our resource to those who would otherwise be unable to access it.”
Dr Mohamed Jalloh, Urologist and Surgeon at Hôpital General de Grand Yoff in Senegal expressed enthusiasm about the partnership.“I have been eagerly hoping for just such a journal to be produced,” he said. “My colleagues in Senegal and elsewhere in the HINARI countries will gain much from this opportunity, and look forward to recommending the filming of further procedures of particular relevance to our settings. This approach would be of particular interest in remote areas lacking medical specialists where access to these movies can sustain the competency based learning/practice.’’
*An Estimation of the Global Volume of Surgery: a modeling strategy based on available data. The Lancet.
