The Virtual Lecture Hall (VLH.com) offers online CME programs to meet medical (physician) licensing requirements for communication, professionalism, and systems-based care.

These special licensing requirements include topics such as: medical errors prevention, medical ethics, risk management, patient safety, professional responsibility, cultural competency, pain management, infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS), infection control, domestic violence, sexual assault, palliative medicine, end-of-life care, and universal precautions.

Our online CME programs meet almost all special state CME requirements:

• We have a national focus.
• We work closely with state regulators to monitor and comply with requirements.
• We are continuously expanding our course library.

Our online CME courses are enjoyable:

• We emphasize interactive, self-paced learning.
• See how physicians rate and comment on our courses.
• We have been successfully developing online CME since 1997.

Our site is convenient:

• Everything is online and available 24/7.
• We keep track of your progress. You can start and stop when you wish.
• Specialty training is not necessary to participate in any program.
• The courses will help you easily meet CME needs in topics related to communication, professionalism, and systems-based care.

Our CME programs are high quality:

• We use an evidence-based approach.
• All courses are reviewed and sponsored for CME credit by academic centers and professional societies.
• The site is physician owned and supported by its subscribers.
• All evaluations and comments are always available.
• Our staff regularly publishes in the educational research literature.

VLH.com began providing online CME courses in May 1998. To date, physicians and other health professionals have earned 113,452 hours of CME credit at VLH.com.

The Virtual Lecture Hall is owned by Medical Directions, Inc., an education publishing and research company. The site does not accept advertisements and is supported primarily by fees from individual users and organizations that purchase site memberships. Some of our course development is supported by grants from federal agencies or health care organizations. VLH.com does not offer CME courses supported by educational grants from pharmaceutical or device companies.

Medical Directions, Inc., the owner of The Virtual Lecture Hall, is committed to improving medical education. We believe that truly interactive online education that is based on sound principles of adult learning theory can be enjoyable and effective. To our knowledge, we are the only distributor of online CME that maintains an active, peer-reviewed research program in medical education.

Our research has demonstrated that well-developed, problem-oriented online CME can improve physician knowledge, attitudes, and skills in such diverse areas as cancer prevention and domestic violence. We have also shown that online CME developed in the US can directly benefit physicians in another country (the United Kingdom). We invite you to learn more about our work by viewing the documents below.

Available Articles

We partner with physician groups, hospitals, academic centers, government agencies, and others to provide unbiased, state-of-the-art online educational programs for physicians and physicians in training.

If you would like to offer The Virtual Lecture Hall's programs to your group, please contact us for further information. We can:

• Create a customized Internet gateway for your users.
• Feature particular courses or programs on your members' VLH.com homepage.
• Provide you with user statistics.
• Send you a list of references.
• Offer CME discounts for larger bulk/group purchases .

Online education and training for health professionals is our strong suit. We are also experts in measuring outcomes. (See our Published Research.)

We have worked with physicians and other medical educators to produce numerous cutting-edge education programs. We can create a program for your organization by working with your experts or by helping you find the best authors. Alternatively, we can customize one of our existing online programs to meet your specific requirements.

After you decide on the program topic and the authors, we can do it all:

• Project management
• Content editing
• Preparing and refining "screenplays" for online production
• Graphics, video, audio
• Managing CME sponsorship
• Web hosting
• E-commerce
• Online reports
• Site updating