Blended eHealth education

Successful eHealth implementation and adoption requires knowledgeable and skilled health professionals (1). However, eHealth is not or only minimally included in future health professionals’ education. With this presentation, we share the innovative blended eHealth education approach of the Centre for eHealth and Wellbeing Research (CEWR) to show how knowledge on eHealth can be disseminated in different ways and for different target groups. Our education focuses on the relation between humans, technology, and the context from a sociotechnical perspective. We teach knowledge, practice insights and skills for the development, implementation and evaluation of eHealth (1, 2). We educate bachelor and master students from various studies, such as Psychology, Technical Medicine and Health Sciences, and we provide masterclasses for health professionals via the Dutch eHealth Association (NeHS). In all these educational activities, we use innovative, technology-supported approaches. The foundation of our education is the “eHealth Research, Theory & Development: a Multidisciplinary Approach” book and supporting micro lectures that students can study in their own time. Thereby, we “flipped the classroom” (3) by transforming traditional lectures to interactive workshops, in which students discuss ongoing research, practice with real-life cases and experience state-of-the-art technologies (e.g. VR presentation-skills training and analysing self-monitored Fitbit data). Also, we’ve developed a free massive open online course (MOOC) to disseminate our knowledge with (hitherto over 22.000) other interested people. With this blended education approach, we equip students and healthcare professionals with skills to improve eHealth development, implementation and evaluation, which is needed to optimize eHealth’s potential in practice.