DIACOM: a collective learning forum for continuing medical education

DIACOM forum (Case based Interactive discussions for Medical education) is a computing tool dedicated to physicians in continuing education. Its goal is learning based on a distant clinical case confrontation between peers. Each learner can describe a case from his or her own experience, and the underlying system puts authors in touch whose cases have common points of interest. Research works managed in the SaSo Laboratory aims at developing a DIACOM from prototype for Continuing Medical Education (CME) in pediatric pain management. This paper presents the theoretical and pedagogic context and the functioning of the DIACOM forum.