Roni Zeiger

Gone are the days where medical students learned mostly from textbooks and anatomy atlases. But medical education still relies on learning from a modest number of teachers and patients, which in aggregate comprise a small subset of what practicing physicians need to know. Continuing medical education (CME) is designed to address this problem, but it is well documented that most CME is ineffective. The emergence of online communities for physicians and patients is a model for how future medical students — and clinicians more generally — can learn from and with each other in ways that transcend their individual experiences. Equally important, such approaches can build habits and methods of learning that constitute a career-long learning process, which is increasingly important as the pace of innovation in medicine has far exceeded what any one of us can keep up with alone.