Digital Health Education for the Future: The SaNuRN Consortium's Journey (Preprint)
Authors: Grosjean Julien , Dufour Frank , Benis Arriel , Januel Jean-Marie , Staccini Pascal , Darmoni Stéfan J 
Published: October 2023

BACKGROUND

SaNuRN is a five-year project by the University of Rouen Normandy (URN) and the Côte d'Azur University (CAU) consortium to optimize digital health education for health-related students, professionals, and administrators. The project includes a skills framework, training modules, and teaching resources. SaNuRN is expected to train a significant part of 400,000 health and paramedical professions students in 2027 at the French national level.

OBJECTIVE

Our purpose is to give a synopsis of the SaNuRN initiative, emphasizing its novel educational methods and how they will enhance the delivery of digital health education. Our goals include showcasing SaNuRN as a comprehensive program consisting of a proficiency framework, instructional modules, and educational materials and explaining how SaNuRN is implemented in the participating academic institutions.

METHODS

SaNuRN is a project aimed at educating and training health-related students in digital health. The project results from a cooperative effort between URN and CAU, covering four French departments. The project is based on the French National Referential on Digital Health (FNRDH), which defines the skills and competencies to be acquired and validated by every student in the health, paramedical, and social professions curricula. The SaNuRN team is currently adapting the existing URN and CAU syllabi to FNRDH and developing short-duration video capsules of 20 to 30 minutes to teach all the relevant material. The project aims to ensure that the largest student population earns the necessary skills, and it has developed a two-tier system involving facilitators who will enable the efficient expansion of the project's educational outreach and support the students in learning the needed material efficiently.

RESULTS

With a focus on real-world scenarios and innovative teaching activities integrating telemedicine devices and virtual professionals, SaNuRN is committed to enabling continuous learning for healthcare professionals in clinical practice. The SaNuRN team introduced new ways of evaluating healthcare professionals by shifting from a knowledge-based to a competencies-based evaluation, aligning with the Miller teaching pyramid and using the Objective Structured Clinical Examination and Script Concordance Test in digital health education. Drawing on the expertise of URN, CAU, and their public health and digital research laboratories and partners, the SaNuRN project represents a platform for continuous innovation, including telemedicine training and living labs with virtual and interactive professional activities.

CONCLUSIONS

The SaNuRN project provides a comprehensive, personalized 30-hour training package for health and paramedical students, addressing all 70 FNRDH competencies. The program is enhanced using AI and NLP to create virtual patients and professionals for digital healthcare simulation. SaNuRN teaching materials are accessible in open access. The project collaborates with academic institutions worldwide to develop educational material in digital health in English and multilingual formats. SaNuRN offers a practical and persuasive training approach to meet the nowadays digital health education requirements.