Heart University – A deeper look with Justin Tretter, MD

By David K. Werho, MD @DWerho

In a rapidly changing world, who knew how different our lives and learning would be?  Published in April of this year, as part of the Cardiology in the Young COVID-19 Open Access Collection, Dr. Justin Tretter from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and his colleagues describe the Heart University platform and how it’s contributing to free open access education for pediatric and adult congenital cardiology trainees across the world.  I had the chance to dig a little deeper with Dr. Tretter. 

DKW: You mention the current pandemic and the changing scale of the world, particularly due to technology, as major impetuses for the need for a large-scale, open access, centralized repository of pediatric cardiology e-learning content.  Obviously, none of us knew how the world would change so rapidly over the last several months, and I wonder how your thinking about the platform has evolved since you began working on it in 2017 to today? How did the pandemic affect your timeline for hard launch?  Further, how has the pandemic impacted the number of users and how engaged they are?  Do you have updated metrics that reflect the growth of engagement through the pandemic?

JTT: The timing for our hard launch could not have been more optimal to provide such a necessary resource during the COVID 19 pandemic, however it was all by chance that it related in any way to the pandemic and the educational needs that came along. From May 2019 until approximately December 2019, we had worked diligently on improving upon the organization and navigation of the website, largely guided by feedback we received during our soft launch of the site dating back to February 2019. However, with these revisions of the site came many unforeseen technical issues, which consumed much of our time through the late summer to early winter of 2019. The date of the hard launch in February 2020 had nothing to do with any predictions of how the pandemic would change the medical academic environment, but was solely based on our ability to resolve these unforeseen technical issues, and get the site fully functioning and to a point that we felt was ready for potential users. Since the hard launch in February 2020, the site grew from just over 2000 users, to now over 5000 users from over 125 countries and 6 continents. We have watched the daily logins almost triple from March to April and remain relatively stable thereafter reflecting the timeline with the pandemic and need for social distancing.

To read this interview in full, click here.