Motivation: Why user driven learning approach to health care?

Defining the medical information user

The mind always needs to keep learning and in medicine information keeps expanding at a rate that is quite a challenge for all levels of medical learners. Information needs drive learning and we begin by identifying the various information needs of different human categories that desperately need to learn.

Categories of medical learners (potential users/consumers):

Category I (Patients and their relatives, primary care givers) All humans are potential physicians but only a few receive formal training. The initial queries of “ Where is the problem? Why is this happening?” are all standard disease localization approaches utilized by physicians and it is likely that similar queries are also posed by patients and their family members (very often to their own physicians/health professionals higher in the learning hierarchy).

Category II (Physicians/Health professionals, secondary care givers) they are formally trained real world healers who are generally looked upon by most humans as areas of support whenever their health systems are in trouble. In terms of learning needs they remain life long medical students. [1]

Both categories have to constantly keep learning and updating themselves to keep up with the vast body of medical information connected by a spidery web that keeps evolving and changing rapidly.

“There is no doctor or patient, only different categories of medical learners”.