Digital Health Education for the Future: The SaNuRN (Santé Numérique Rouen-Nice) Consortium’s Journey

Abstract

Santé Numérique Rouen-Nice (SaNuRN; “Digital Health Rouen-Nice” in English) is a 5-year project by the University of Rouen Normandy (URN) and Côte d’Azur University (CAU) consortium to optimize digital health education for medical and paramedical students, professionals, and administrators. The project includes a skills framework, training modules, and teaching resources. In 2027, SaNuRN is expected to train a significant portion of the 400,000 health and paramedical students at the French national level. Our purpose is to give a synopsis of the SaNuRN initiative, emphasizing its novel educational methods and how they will enhance the delivery of digital health education. Our goals include showcasing SaNuRN as a comprehensive program consisting of a proficiency framework, instructional modules, and educational materials and explaining how SaNuRN is implemented in the participating academic institutions. SaNuRN is aimed at educating and training health and paramedical students in digital health. The project is a cooperative effort between URN and CAU, covering 4 French departments. It is based on the French National Referential on Digital Health (FNRDH), which defines the skills and competencies to be acquired and validated by every student in the health, paramedical, and social professions curricula. The SaNuRN team is currently adapting the existing URN and CAU syllabi to FNRDH and developing short-duration video capsules of 20-30 minutes to teach all the relevant material. The project aims to ensure that the largest student population earns the necessary skills, and it has developed a 2-tier system involving facilitators who will enable the efficient expansion of the project’s educational outreach and support the students in learning the needed material efficiently. With a focus on real-world scenarios and innovative teaching activities integrating telemedicine devices and virtual professionals, SaNuRN is committed to enabling continuous learning for health care professionals in clinical practice. The SaNuRN team introduced new ways of evaluating health care professionals by shifting from a knowledge-based to a competencies-based evaluation, aligning with the Miller teaching pyramid and using the Objective Structured Clinical Examination and Script Concordance Test in digital health education. Drawing on the expertise of URN, CAU, and their public health and digital research laboratories and partners, SaNuRN represents a platform for continuous innovation, including telemedicine training and living labs with virtual and interactive professional activities. SaNuRN provides a comprehensive, personalized, 30-hour training package for health and paramedical students, addressing all 70 FNRDH competencies. The project is enhanced using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to create virtual patients and professionals for digital health care simulation. SaNuRN teaching materials are open access. It collaborates with academic institutions worldwide to develop educational material on digital health in English and multilingual formats. SaNuRN offers a practical and persuasive training approach to meet the current digital health education requirements.