Medical Podcasting in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Needs Assessment and Vision for the Future

Abstract

Phenomenon: Physician shortages in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) have led to increased interest in using e-learning tools for training. Organic digital education (ODE)—digital scholarship largely created outside of formal medical curricula—has increased in popularity over the past decade. Medical podcasting has become one of the most prominent asynchronous ODE sources for learners in high-income (HI) countries; there have been no previous attempts to characterize their use in LMIC. Approach: Listener data from a 2-year period from three major internal medicine podcasts—Bedside Rounds, Core IM, and The Curbsiders—were aggregated, 188 episodes in total. These data were subdivided into country by top-level domain, normalized by population, and grouped together by World Bank income levels and English-speaking status. This methodology was also repeated to compare individual episodes on topics more versus less relevant to learners in LMIC. Findings: Over a 2-year period, the three podcasts had a total of 2.3 million unique downloads and were listened to in 192 of 207 countries worldwide. Overall, 91.5% of downloads were in HI countries, with 8.2% in LMIC. A total of 86.1% of listens were in countries with English as an official or unofficial listed language, whereas 13.8% were in countries without. Normalized for population, listeners in HI countries represented 970.5 listens per million population compared with 12.4 per million in LMIC. An analysis of individual episodes by topic showed that material more relevant to learners in LMIC had significantly more listeners from these countries. Insights: Compared with other forms of ODE, medical podcasting has much lower uptake in LMIC. However, there are considerable opportunities for growth. Medical podcasters in HI countries should be aware of a potential global audience and should take concrete steps to ensure a diversity of content and to periodically audit their data. Medical educators in LMIC should consider podcasting as a potentially powerful form of teaching. International medical educational organizations as well as podcasting organizations should provide resources for educators in these countries.

Keywords:

• Podcasts
• social media
• medical education
• asynchronous education

Acknowledgments

We thank Robert Centor, Christopher Chiu, Stuart Brigham, Paul Williams, and all the other members of the PodSquad Research Group for their assistance.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.