Neurosurgical Interactive Teaching Series: Multidisciplinary Educational Approach

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 continuing medical education 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 were compared through an analysis of variance. Further analysis on specific questions was performed with a Fisher 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 continuing medical education evaluations over the course of 3 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). CONCLUSIONS: 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, multidisciplinary, case-based lectures as presented in this manuscript.