Restructuring rural continuing medical education through videoconferencing

We piloted a videoconferencing continuing medical education programme for rural physicians in Alberta and compared its feasibility, acceptability and cost implications with currently existing telephone conferencing and regional conference programmes. Videoconferencing clearly had advantages over telephone conferencing but was not as well appreciated by consumers as the existing regional conference programme. Nonetheless, the videoconferencing programme, although somewhat more costly than telephone conferencing, was associated with considerable cost-savings compared with the regional conference programme. On balance, we concluded that further development of the videoconferencing programme is warranted and we will slowly replace existing telephone conferencing programmes. However, there remains a need for the current regional conference programme.