Neurosurgical Interactive Teaching Series: A Multidisciplinary Educational Approach

Ramos-Fresnedo, Andres; Domingo, Ricardo A.; ReFaey, Karim; Gassie, Kelly; Clifton, William; Grewal, Sanjeet S.; Chen, Selby G.; Chaichana, Kaisorn L.; Quiñones-Hinojosa, Alfredo

Objective The goal of this manuscript is to investigate the effects of a multidisciplinary multinational web-based teaching conference on trainee education, research and patient care. Methods We present the structure, case selection and presentation of our educational lectures. We retrospectively reviewed our database to gather data on the number of presentations, type of presentation, and the pathology diagnosis from November 11, 2016 until February 28, 2020. To investigate attendee satisfaction, we analyzed our yearly CME evaluation survey results to report the impact that this series may have had on our attendees. We assigned a numeric value to the answers and the mean overall scores where compared through an ANOVA. Further analysis on specific questions was performed with a Fisher’s exact test. Results We have hosted 150 lectures, in which we have presented 208 neurosurgical cases corresponding to 133 general session, 59 pituitary, and 16 spine cases, as well as 28 distinct lectures by guest speakers from institutions across the globe. We received 61 responses to our yearly CME evaluations over the course of three years. On these evaluations, we have maintained an excellent overall rating from 2017-2019 (two-sided p>0.05) and received significantly less suggestions to improve the series comparing 2017 with 2019 (two-sided, p=0.04). Conclusion As the world of medicine is constantly changing, we are in need of developing new tools to enhance our ability to relay knowledge through accredited and validated methods onto physicians-in-training, such as the implementation of structured, multi-disciplinary, case-based lectures as presented in this manuscript.