Rolling e-learning: an educational model to support Italian healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic

Rolling reviews have been widely used by the scientific community during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide guidelines and identify potential treatments in such a quickly evolving emergency. Throughout the two pandemic years, we provided independent and continuously updated (rolling) e-learning courses on COVID-19 targeted to Italian healthcare professionals with the aim of increasing dissemination based on the emerging evidence. The results of this project are presented in this brief report.

We launched five main courses on COVID-19 - with focus on treatments and vaccines - from February 2020 to December 2022. For each course, we collected and analised participation data and, via questionnaires, customer-satisfaction data on relevance, quality, efficacy and sponsor perception.

From 22 February 2020 to 31 December 2022, a total of 224,459 enrollments were registered over the five courses with 192,966 passes (86%), for which Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits were awarded. Over 94% of participants considered the contents of high quality, relevant and effective for their educational needs. The absence of sponsorship perception, 83% overall, decreased relevantly for the two courses on COVID-19 vaccines (68.3%).

Italian healthcare professionals working during the pandemic overwhelmingly appreciated and valued the rolling e-learning offer aimed at widening the dissemination of the best practices on COVID-19. This educational model provides independent, evidence-based and tailored information with the undoubted advantages of time flexibility, remote participation and continuous update, all elements that make it a useful tool in a pandemic as well as in a post-pandemic era.