PRESENT e-Learning System

With the rapid growth of medical information and the growing challenge that medical device and pharmaceutical companies face in keeping their healthcare provider (HCP) customers and their employees up to date, efficient online education has become more important than ever. The education market is quickly traversing from live conferences to online learning management system (LMS), bringing HCPs the ability to learn new concepts at their fingertips. However, the evolution of online LMSs in medical education has been slow and most still require skilled programmers to administer. Tracing back to 2003, young physicians, Alan Sherman and Michael Shore were looking for a solution specifically designed to provide professional education on demand that offered pre and post-tests, issued certificates instantly and had an easy to use administrative backend. Much to their dismay, there was no such solution available in the market. There were packages for live and simultaneous teaching and administrative courses but none for on demand professional CME education. Set out with the aim to revolutionize the scenario, Sherman and Shore founded PRESENT e-Learning Systems to provide effective education through an online LMS solution specially designed to meet the requirements of the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, as well as professional medical associations and specialty societies.

The company’s online LMS—PRESENT Mentor, offers education on demand allowing HCPs to learn whenever they are free and receptive and offers certificates immediately after the course is completed. “Unlike live medical conferences, where HCPs sit in a lecture hall and lose concentration after a few hours, our online training gives them the option of taking education at their own pace, whenever they are ready,” says Sherman. PRESENT Mentors offers the ability to host unlimited accredited lectures on a website that are ready to be delivered on demand. To enhance the educational experience, the solution provides pre and post-testing to examine the learner and calculates their outcome score. PRESENT Mentor also conducts a post-test 90 days after the education was taken to measure the retention and efficiency of the education.

In an effort to build a community of like-minded medical professionals on the site, the solution boasts of an interesting feature called the colleague matching system that matches the training, experiences and interests of a particular user to that of another user in the system. “We have a sophisticated algorithm that compares various member profiles and suggests matches with other users,” says Sherman. Each user receives an invitation by the system to view member profiles matching their own and send them invitations to be added as their colleagues. Further, the system leverages artificial intelligence to connect the activities of users with their colleagues by notifying them via email of their activity on the site. For instance, when a physician watches a lecture or takes part in a discussion in their area of interest; their colleagues will be notified so that they can also participate in the same lecture.

Unlike live CME/CE conferences, where health care providers sit in a lecture hall and lose concentration after a few hours, our online training gives them the option of taking education whenever they are ready

PRESENT Mentor effectively recreates the informal HCP to HCP education part of a live medical conference through its online communities, where teachers and learners connect easily and collaborate in a frictionless manner. “We realized that informal peer to peer education has long played an essential role in HCPs’ professional development, so we have brought that feature online as well,” says Sherman. Importantly, the PRESENT Mentor online learning management system is built in a way that non-programmers can easily administer with the ability to easily load education materials, enroll users and generate reporting. PRESENT runs seven of its own medical conferences, with which it has perfected the model of repurposing video recorded conference sessions for on-demand online playback. PRESENT e-Learning System’s LMS has been instrumental in administering graduate educational programs for over 100 residency programs, supplementing their existing informal learning with formal online education, private online education programs for medical device companies, as well as delivering accredited CME education to thousands of HCPs.

Moving ahead, the PRESENT e-Learning Systems seeks to partner with medical associations and medical specialty societies, as well a medical device and pharmaceutical companies to carry out online education programs for them.