Interoperability of case-based training systems in medicine : The CASEPORT approach

CASEPORT 1 makes available extensive collections of medical cases from various distributed first rank case-based e-learning systems to teachers, students and physicians in Germany. By unifying content from various sources, a critical mass for the integration of online case-based courses into undergraduate and postgraduate medical contexts is provided. To facilitate the cooperation between the different CASEPORT subsystems a technical integration concept for unified user-management, tracking of learners’ performance, etc. was developed. This paper shows the resulting structure of CASEPORT-components and the information flow between its components to achieve the intended interoperability. The integration of further learning systems was successfully demonstrated. In the future, the CASEPORT portal technology will be opened up for systematic and didactical content materials.