Diabetes Patient Education: Through Interactive Animations, Joslin Brings Fresh Approach to Online Diabetes Education
BOSTON — July 11, 2002 — Joslin Diabetes Center has enlisted the help of computer animation — and an interactive multimedia agency — to create a brand new on-line diabetes patient education initiative that its creators believe will help people with diabetes learn more effectively than traditional text-based online learning.
"The Web clearly offers a fantastic platform for getting vital diabetes patient education out to as many people as possible," says Julie Rafferty, Director of Communications at Harvard-affiliated Joslin. "Many Internet sites have tried to do patient education — including ours. But most of the education available online has been in the form of pages and pages of text.
"We realized we needed something a bit more lively to get people's attention — and to help reinforce essential learning outcomes," she says.
To this end, Joslin has collaborated with multimedia e-learning specialists ClearPoint Media, based in New York City. "ClearPoint came to us with some excellent ideas for turning our traditional materials — books, pamphlets and so on — into dynamic, interactive on-line education that we hope people have a lot of fun using," she says.
Diabetes affects 17 million Americans and is growing at epidemic proportions, with a nearly 40 percent increase in diabetes in the past decade. It is now the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. and the cost to society is estimated to be over $100 billion annually.
People with diabetes serve as an integral part of their own medical team, making daily adjustments in their diet, exercise and medication as needed in response to home blood sugar monitoring results as they seek to keep blood sugars under excellent control to prevent diabetes complications.
Research shows that poorly controlled diabetes can lead to a host of complications, including blindness, kidney disease, heart disease and stroke, nerve damage, and amputations.
The Joslin-ClearPoint team has now put three highly interactive animated educational programs online at a specific section of Joslin's Web site, http://onlineclasses.joslin.org/. These provide the basics regarding what causes diabetes and what can influence high and low blood sugars in someone who has diabetes. They include Flash computer animations to cover such topics as the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and the effects of illness, alcohol, stress and eating on blood sugar levels. More educational programs are planned over the next year on a wide range of topics.
The tutorials that have been built thus far are available for other companies and Web sites to license, and the new ones to be developed will be licensed as well, to make the information as widely available as possible. Custom tutorials can also be developed to meet an organization's needs.
Bruno Kavanagh, e-learning specialist with ClearPoint says, "A key part of Joslin's mission is to educate — to help people avoid complications that can arise from diabetes, and if possible to avoid diabetes altogether. The whole of society has a huge stake in this, with vast burdens being placed on the healthcare system. We believe the Internet can — and will — play an increasingly important role in getting life-saving messages out to the populations that need to hear them. We approached Joslin because they are second-to-none in the field of diabetes education and research. We felt we could help them get the message out there, and these first tutorials represent the first step in what I hope will be a long and exciting project."
The Joslin diabetes tutorials can be seen at www.onlineclasses.joslin.org/
