RESUMEN
Today, World Wide Web technology provides many opportunities in the disclosure of electronic learning and teaching content. The MEFANET project (MEdical FAculties NETwork) has initiated international, effective and open cooperation among all Czech and Slovak medical faculties in the medical education fields. This paper introduces the original MEFANET educational web portal platform. Its main aim is to present the unique collaborative environment, which combines the sharing of electronic educational resources with the use tools for their quality evaluation. It is in fact a complex e-publishing system, which consists of ten standalone portal instances and one central gateway. The fundamental principles of the developed system and used technologies are reported here, as well as procedures of a new multidimensional quality assessment.
Asunto(s)
Educación Médica/organización & administración , Internet , Seguridad Computacional , Conducta Cooperativa , República Checa , Educación Médica/métodos , Educación Médica/normas , EslovaquiaRESUMEN
OBJECTIVES: Oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is a multifaceted field involving many factors. The aim of our study was to assess whether implant therapy improves OHRQoL in dental patients. METHODS: Patients receiving at least one implant completed a health-related questionnaire before and after the implantation (minimum 1.5 months). Questions covered the functional and aesthetic scales (AS). Paired differences in individual scores were analysed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. A univariate analysis of covariance was used to relate overall and scale-specific average paired differences to age, gender, marital and educational status. Multivariate analysis of covariance was used to assess interactions between the covariates and different scales of outcome. All tests were performed at statistical significance level α = 0.05. RESULTS: All twelve Wilcoxon tests supported an improvement in OHRQoL after implant placement. On the AS, the mean difference in OHRQoL scores was found to be associated with marital status, presence of aesthetic reasons for undergoing the surgery and number of front teeth replaced by implants. On the functional scale (FS), most significant associations were observed with the number of front teeth replaced via implantation, followed by the presence of chewing problems and marital status. The multivariate analysis helped to identify the covariates that varied significantly over the two scales of interest. CONCLUSIONS: Effects of covariates responding significantly differently on different scales should not be summarized using an overall univariate analysis, using paired score differences averaged over all items. Such effect summary would be misleading. In the present study, significant implant-related improvements in OHRQoL were observed on both the aesthetic and FS in patients with at least one implant in the front dental area.
Asunto(s)
Implantes Dentales , Calidad de Vida , Análisis de Varianza , Escolaridad , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Estado Civil , Persona de Mediana Edad , Estadísticas no Paramétricas , Encuestas y CuestionariosRESUMEN
Important worldwide websites offering medical informatics have been searched through to find freely available web-based sources for teaching of medical informatics at faculties of medicine. The conclusion suggests that a complex system for teaching of the whole field of study does not exist. However, a sufficient offer of specialized articles, model programmes and presentations is available, which can be used for teaching. The author lists a brief characterization of the found sources and the programmes he uses. This computer-aided research is only rough. A more precisely defined searching strategy can help find other sources of specialized subjects useful for medical informatics.