WWW-based continuing medical education: how do general practitioners use it?

WWW-based Continuing Medical Education (CME) is assumed to have the potential to make up for shortcomings in traditional lifelong learning of General Practitioners (GPs). This is obvious for CME systems with accreditation and control of the individual GP's CME activities but seems less clear for non-controlled CME systems like in several European countries, e.g. Germany. This paper reports results from the evaluation of a German CME website by 59 GPs (internet experience of 20 months on average) during a 4-months period. GPs mainly learned at home after work, with 46% of the GPs visiting the website at least once per month. Self-study and information seeking accounted for 58% of the activities, while communication and interaction were used infrequently. 77% of the GPs judged less but detailed information on selected topics more important than being able to access many but broad contents. GPs mostly prefer established means of learning and communication. It is concluded that the GPs' self-directed individual learning mainly needs high-quality information and well-structured collections of existing relevant WWW resources. Communication, virtual community building and sophisticated interactivity are of little importance at present. WWW-based CME complements existing CME activities, especially regarding individual information seeking on focused problems.