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Red dots represent the international usage of St. Jude’s Cure4Kids educational and collaboration Web site.

Developing nations have limited access to the latest in cancer research and education but thanks to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, healthcare providers across the globe can communicate via a free Web site called Cure4Kids™.

Cure4Kids is the leading education and collaboration Web site dedicated to supporting the care of children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases worldwide. It provides not only high quality content for continuing education, but also Web communication tools to support international collaborations among pediatric oncologists/hematologists, physicians, nurses and other health professionals. All content and services are provided at no cost to the users.

“The initial and main objective is to help countries that have limited resources to be able to access knowledge on how to treat children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases,” explained Yuri Quintana, PhD, director of education and informatics of the international outreach program at St. Jude.

But it’s not just for limited resource nations. Thousands of users in North America and Europe utilize the site on a regular basis.

“It’s become a valuable tool for the entire world,” Quintana said.

When the site launched in 2002, it had 35 users. Today, Cure4Kids provides educational content to more than 10,000 doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals in 156 countries. Content is presented in the form of online seminars and conferences with audio narration; electronic full-text books and journals; and online self-paced courses. All material can be easily downloaded and shared for educational use.

Much of the information comes from St. Jude conferences as well as authors from other institutions, international organizations and medical societies. Most of the users find out about the site through word of mouth and recommendations from users of the site.

Content is developed by world experts in the care of children with cancer, various blood disorders, and selected catastrophic conditions such as HIV/AIDS. Most of the content is in English, but selected materials are available in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic.

Information is updated weekly and more than 1,000 seminars are available. Cure4Kids releases about 200 seminars annually and five to eight international conferences. In addition, they have more than 20 self-pay courses for training new doctors and nurses.

“In many international universities, they don’t have really well developed oncology education programs, so there are several universities that are using our conferences to expand the education of their medical students,” Quintana explained.

The site also offers the opportunity for live meetings to discuss interesting cases. This virtual room allows participants all over the world to have audio discussions while presenting slides and images.

Each day, the site picks up about 300 new users, Quintana said, and 10 new countries per year sign up. Challenges remain in reaching remote pockets of the globe like Greenland and the Western Sahara, but Quintana expects to reach those areas as more and more neighboring countries come on board and spread the word. Internet speed is also a challenge in some places, so the informatics team makes all of the content easy to download and formatted for printing.

“We encourage people to download and redistribute the content so it can reach other people who don’t have internet access,” Quintana said.

For the rare and particularly difficult cases that were coming into the live chats, St. Jude created Oncopedia™, a pediatric oncology version of the popular interactive site, Wikipedia™. Oncopedia is a freely accessible subsection on the Cure4Kids Web site.

The content consists of complex hematology/oncology cases and images, with specific questions about patient management, controversial topics, and interesting presenting features, including illustrations of patients’ clinical characteristics and imaging and pathology findings. An international editorial board reviews all contributions at no charge, and cases chosen for Oncopedia are posted with expert commentary from the editorial board and opened for online, moderated discussion. Oncopedia will also make available rare cases that are not usually discussed in expensive international medical journals.

“In many instances, not a lot is known about these cases and this is an opportunity for those difficult cases to have some sort of input from senior experts,” added Quintana.

Currently Quintana and his team are working on formats to deliver information to handheld devices, allowing information to be distributed where there is little computer support. An I-Pod could hold a few hundred seminars, explained Quintana, and could be sent anywhere.

“All of this is possible,” he concluded, “because of the tremendous support of donors around the world and our volunteers.”

For more information visit, www.cure4kids.org



November 2007

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