Experience with a Spanish-language laparoscopy website.
BACKGROUND
Although there are no clearly defined electronic tools for continuing medical education (CME), new information technologies offer a basic platform for presenting training content on the internet. Due to the shortage of websites about minimally invasive surgery in the Spanish language, we set up a topical website in Spanish.


METHODS
This study considers the experience with the website between April 2001 and January 2005. To study the activity of the website, the registry information was analyzed descriptively using the log files of the server. To study the characteristics of the users, we searched the database of registered users.


RESULTS
We found a total of 107,941 visits to our website and a total of 624,895 page downloads. Most visits to the site were made from Spanish-speaking countries. The most frequent professional profile of the registered users was that of general surgeon.


CONCLUSIONS
The development, implementation, and evaluation of Spanish-language CME initiatives over the internet is promising but presents challenges.
Department of General Surgery, La Mancha-Centro General Hospital, C/Sancho IV, 18, 13600 Alcázar de San Juan, Ciudad Real, Spain. drmoreno@laparoscopia-online.com
Carlos
C
Moreno-Sanz
Jose B
JB
Seoane-González
D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007802:Language; D010535:Laparoscopy