Postgraduate Medical Education by Telephone

Use of telephone connections to provide postgraduate medical training in Indiana was a long-running initiative developed by the Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine in Indianapolis. Starting in 1950, that institution employed leased telephones to connect faculty members to doctors in participating counties across Indiana, allowing listeners to avoid travel away from home in order to access advanced lectures and trainings on pertinent medical topics. The programming was especially important to rural doctors who otherwise would have been forced to seek postgraduate training in urban areas, including out-of-state cities, thereby leading to a loss of physicians in Indiana. IU School of Medicine’s telephone programming lasted for almost twenty years before evolving into a televised postgraduate medical education program.

On October 3, 1950, the IU School of Medicine transmitted a medical postgraduate class to multiple listeners by telephone. This was the first such occurrence in Indiana and possibly in the United States. IU partnered with the Indiana State Medical Association to launch the use of telephone technology to reach greater numbers of Indiana medical professionals with postgraduate-level continuing medical education.

The pilot session was a panel discussion about pediatrics titled “Problems Relating to Children Arising in the Practice of Medicine.” Lyman Meiks of Riley Hospital for Children moderated a conversation involving three IU School of Medicine physicians: J. Stanley Battersby, Byron Rust, and William H. Norman. A leased telephone wire transmitted the conversation from the IU Medical Center in Indianapolis to Lafayette, Indiana, where an audience from the Medical Staff Society of St. Elizabeth Hospital listened in.

Survey results from this experimental transmission demonstrated a positive reception. Respondents noted the clarity of the reception and their sustained interest throughout. Their suggestions for future improvement included the addition of visual aids and a two-way communication capability to allow for audience questions.

The first major test of the telephone system took place on November 7, 1950. More than 600 physicians representing medical societies in seventeen Indiana counties met at nearby hospitals and hotels to listen to a roundtable discussion by physicians at the IU Medical Center in Indianapolis, who addressed drugs such as ACTH, cortisone, antibiotics, and NPH insulin. Participants noted their satisfaction with the telephone-transmitted seminar, and eight additional counties joined the next program. Occurring on December 5, 1950, this event attracted 750 physicians for segments titled “Chemotherapy of Urinary Tract Infections,” “Antibiotics,” and “The Sulfa Group.”

Arrangements were made with numerous telephone companies for the fledgling program to continue in 1951. Private telephones were leased in every county in the state desiring to participate. The hour-long program aired on the first Tuesday of each month beginning at 8:00 p.m.

Within a decade, the program expanded to reach almost eighty-five percent of doctors throughout Indiana. Medical professionals in neighboring states recognized the program’s potential for reaching doctors in their own states. While several such leaders suggested that their own medical schools join the IU telephone education network, these proposed collaborations failed to take shape.

Eventually, the IU School of Medicine shifted its remote postgraduate medical education to newer technologies, including television. Though infrastructure and funding challenges delayed the school’s adoption of television for this purpose, TV broadcasts of clinical courses to doctors statewide began in 1969. This transition marked the end of the pioneering telephonic training program begun by the institution two decades earlier.