Abstract
Objective: To prevent vision-threatening eye diseases in nonindustrialized countries, a continuous medical education is necessary. Professionally interested parties of these countries often lack access to good illustrative material of normal and rare diseases.
Purpose and Main Outcome Measure: Quantification of worldwide acceptance of the social media platform of the open-access journal Atlas of Ophthalmology publishing ophthalmic case reports.
Methods: Currently, overall more than 2,000 cases with about 9,200 pictures are accessible comprising the whole spectrum of ophthalmology. The cases were provided in English, German, Spanish, Russian, and Arabian. The presentation of cases in the languages Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese were in preparation. Submission, review, and publication proceeded completely online. JAVA-supported online tools assisted in the search for cases and pictures, review, and editing. The images are presented in JPEG format of different resolution. The cases were arranged in an anatomically classified arborization and could be extracted according to diagnosis, author, ICD code, and keywords. A certified medical education tool was implemented in the German version with three official CME points per module. The case and picture database was accessible by four communication channels: (1) http://www.atlasophthalmology.com, (2) www.facebook.com/AtlasOphthalmology, (3) iPhone and iPad application, and (4) Atlas 2.0 version. The data of visitors of the year 2013 from January 2013 to November 2013 were analyzed.
Results: Summing up all communication channels, the Atlas of Ophthalmology was frequented in average by N = 7,367 unique visitors per week: 65 % www.atlasophthalmology, 24 % Facebook, and 11 % iPhone application. The site www.atlasophthalmology.com was visited in November 2013 by N = 19.214 visitors with N = 23.518 visits and 169.369 page views. This site has have in average 5,595 ± 315 visitors per week, coming predominantly from Germany (18 %), the USA (15 %), Japan (7 %), and Spanish-speaking countries (9,4 %). In November 2013, the Facebook channel has had a mean reach of 1,470 ± 350 subjects per week and a number of post clicks of 350 ± 259 clicks per week. Using the iPhone and iPad applications, in average 831 unique visitors per week were observed and a total of 4,577 ± 135 cases per week was observed.
Conclusions: Currently, the open-access journal Atlas of Ophthalmology with more than 2,000 published cases has had more than 7,000 visitors per week and is one of the most visited collections of ophthalmic cases. The Atlas of Ophthalmology is recommended by the International Council of Ophthalmology (ICO).
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Michelson, G., Michelson, M. (2015). e-Learning by the Open-Access Journal Atlas of Ophthalmology . In: Michelson, G. (eds) Teleophthalmology in Preventive Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44975-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44975-2_8
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