Online Participative Case Presentations

During my current time off, I have been working on a system to participate in case presentations online.  Case presentations are a common way of sharing medical knowledge and are especially good for teaching the skill of making a differential diagnosis based on history taking and to lesser extant exam skills.  They are also great in teaching how to efficiently rule in or out important differentials.

Currently, case reports are usually done in live situations at individual institutions. This can include "Grand Rounds", "Morbidity and Mortality" (AKA M&M), and "Morning Reports". More distributive methods include the NEJM's classic case report series and several other journals.  To my knowledge there is no standard open source case report repository or system and that is what I'd like to work on.

In my experience, embryonic attempts at open case reports have been done with some success on reddit.com/r/medicine. However, several limitations exist.  These include a need for outside links to show graphical information (such as radiology, ECGs), the lack of an efficient or elegant way for the presenter to update the entire group, and to a lesser extant the lack of real-time interaction.

I've been stewing on several ideas about how to best implement something.  Creating my own website that would have all of the features i want (including a reddit-like meritocracy point system) was one plan, but it would require me to invest a lot of time into network programming.  I have been looking to see if there are already platforms that might be co-opted for this and I think I may have found an answer with twitch.tv

Twitch.tv is a website that my brother introduced me to that was designed for people who enjoy watching other people play video games. I'm thinking that I could stream my desktop with a word processor for the case presentation (and images) and use the chatroom interface for the discussion.  The downsides are the high bandwidth required which would limit participation from those who are practising in areas where high speed internet isn't available.

The other downside is the need for more buy in from participants (ie they need to be available for a specific time rather than with reddit they can post and leave).  This is probably going to be the biggest hurdle and I think I will start by posting more case reports on r/medicine and see if I can drum up a group of like-minded practitioners who might be more willing to try this.