Appropedia, in partnership with Intuitive Foundation, MIT Solve, and Challenge Works, is supporting the knowledge transfer of technical skills created by the Global Surgical Training Competition to ensure that surgical skill training can be achieved effectively and at a low cost. We are interested in leveraging the capabilities of our wiki to help develop, categorize and distribute unstructured content through documentation standards, a knowledge taxonomy and a friendly user experience to aid health professionals in developing countries to learn and improve skills effectively.
The ability to optimize the prevention and treatment of diseases through scientific and technological innovation is one of the most important challenges our world faces. Worldwide health expenditure is becoming less sustainable and requires the utmost effort to ensure that medicine becomes more preventive and precise, so that each technical skill administered is the best possible and potentially curative.
Using Appropedia as an open source platform to implement a model to create, curate, and administer surgical skill training with tools for self-guided distance learning will allow to increase the effectiveness of surgical training, reducing costs and increasing the quality of life of the population.
This way of approaching the health problem can use scientific and technological innovation that allows us to combine the progress of ICT with surgical training. The educational offer of this platform will allow acquiring knowledge of advanced specialized techniques and constant updating in surgery. We will also develop a new approach to sharing know-how through community collaboration and open-licensed content, improving access to quality skill training for medical workers in remote regions or areas.
Appropedia is available to various institutions, from higher education to public authorities. The basis of its success is the possibility to download the material for free and to contribute, thanks to an ever-growing community, to its development based on the needs of a world of learning that is constantly evolving. In this sense, anyone can download the modules that will include a self-assessment function that allows surgical practitioners to test their new skills.
Funding Opportunities[edit | edit source]
Funded by the Intuitive Foundation, the challenge will award grants in three stages, starting with Discovery Awards of up to $200K to at least ten teams in December 2020 to support prototype and self-assessment development. The Finalist Awards of up to $500K will be awarded to three to five teams to improve original prototypes, and $1 million will be awarded to the team that has demonstrated that its original model and additional models developed as a Finalist are validated and impactful. After officially launching on 15 July 2020, MIT Solve is hosting a series of virtual networking and workshop events called Solveathons. Solveathons are interactive design workshops aimed at developing/improving solutions to global challenges.
