We identified a need educate physicians in the rapidly expanding world of genetics and embarked on a project to educate physicians and physicians in training on genetics. We developed a framework to guide the development of an educational intervention. We sought accredidation from ACCME and eventually receive Accredidation with Commendation from them. Subsequent CME projects focused on, training on the use of buprenorphine for patients with opioid addiction, depression and suicide, and tobacco cessation. We have formed partnerships with ASAM to deliver our courses on tobacco and buprenorphine.

We later identified a need to enhance the medical school curriculum and noticed a new found willingness of medical schools to look outside their walls for online educational materials. Our addiction and alcohol medical education projects provide a curriculum that fits our Curriculum Supplementation model.

Our online education showed high satisfaction, and effect on knowledge, attitude and behavior. It was delivered with a case-based approach that placed the user in control. Still it suffered from 3 problems which essentially almost all education suffers:

1. The focus was not on skills. Learning "why" is important, but more importly we need current and future physicians to have the skills to practice medicine according to best practice.
2. We assumed that mentioning other resources or putting in links "connected" us. In a nutshell we were reinventing wheels in an effort to be complete and not dependent on other educator's work.
3. Web 2.0 (Collaboration, user-content, user-feedback) was rudimentary.

For our educational projects we addressed problem #1 above by designing a new solution that utilizes online simulated patients, not just for rating success but for training the user in specific skills, which now define all the objectives for our projects on pain and addiction and SBIRT in primary care.

We first built a solution that focused on improving practice as it relates to patients with addiction and buprenorphine. That allowed us to fix problem #2. We isolated the material that was already "out there" and started building a rich database of resources and a tagging system to allow users to quickly find materials that were developed by us and by others. And we designed that solution to put the user first in terms of open communication, commenting, identifying resources, forming groups, and participating in the success of our education (and theirs).