Mediasite Allows SingHealth Academy Residents Across Singapore to Attend Real-Time Lectures Without Traveling

There’s an increased demand for the use of technology in education in Singapore, especially for web-based communication. So, the SingHealth Academy began exploring different mixes of teaching and learning tools for medical educators and administrators and decided to use webcasting technology to connect medical students and staff at hospitals across Singapore.

SingHealth Academy is part of Singapore Health Services, Singapore’s largest healthcare group with two hospitals, five national specialty centers and a network of polyclinics. It works closely with healthcare institutions and education centers to develop healthcare education and enhance learning processes. It aims to help medical and non-medical professionals sharpen their skills and improve the way people learn by increasing the flexibility of how, when and where learning happens.  

That’s where Mediasite comes in. A few years ago, SingHealth surveyed its employees to find 51 percent of them raised concerns about not being able to attend lectures due to time and distance. Given the large percentage who felt that way, the academy purchased three Mediasite ML (mobile) recorders, and in 2011, it purchased the Mediasite EX Server, a video content management platform to distribute, manage and archive live and on-demand webcasts and videos. In the last year, Mediasite has become their one-stop learning portal for people to access healthcare education content. Over the past two years, they’ve recorded 247 Mediasite presentations that have to date received over 14,000 views. 

“One of the benefits is to support medical students and staff who are unable to come to lectures and class due to family and work commitments. Another benefit is to provide additional learning resources for all the medical students and staff,” said Edison Ng, manager of learning technologies for the academy. 

For example, last year the academy launched an internal medicine residency program, and it currently has 85 residents in two different hospitals. Usually lectures are conducted at Singapore General Hospital, which means residents at the other hospital need to travel to attend. That isn’t very time or cost-efficient. 

“Since we have implemented the Mediasite system, our residents can now attend the real-time lectures without traveling,” he said. “Another advantage for the residents is when they miss the lectures, they can now access their Mediasite portal to watch the lectures anytime, anywhere. Mediasite does give us an edge by introducing mobile technology. Now we can have our lectures uploaded as a podcast format or via real-time to our mobile devices. Podcast lectures can be quickly accessed and downloaded from the internet, transferred to a mobile device and listened to at any time.”