A pioneer in medicine for eight centuries, the University intends to remain so in the digital age with the creation of ESNbyUM. From 2023, this digital health school will train future healthcare professionals, as well as lawyers, engineers and administrative staff. This project, supported by the government as part of the "Skills and professions of the future" call for expressions of interest, will serve as the foundation for the region's future center of excellence in digital health.

For the past ten years or so, digital technology has been revolutionizing the healthcare sector, and has become part of the daily lives of professionals who use software and computerized patient records, or who are confronted with issues of identity vigilance, cyber-security or telemedicine," explains Maurice Hayot, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Montpellier, and hospital practitioner at the CHU. However, at present, there is no specific training dedicated to these issues, with all the problems that this can pose in terms of security, respect for confidentiality, etc. "

The highest level of national funding

To make up for this shortfall, the UM asked Maurice Hayot and a project team of experts in the field to respond to the "Skills and professions of the future" call for expressions of interest (AMI) launched by the government as part of the future investment program 4 (France 2030). " To build our project, we mobilized professors, researchers, trainers and companies, with the aim of creating a digital health school that really corresponds to the expertise of the professions," explains Maurice Hayot. A winning bet, since the Montpellier project is not only one of the 66 winners honored this summer by the government, but it also wins the largest amount of funding in the "digital health training systems" category, with a handsome sum of 4 million euros.

The Region, which intends to use this project as the basis for its future digital health excellence cluster, will contribute 600,000 euros. These substantial sums are in addition to the resources allocated by the consortium members, which include the UM and the CHUs of Montpellier and Nîmes, as well as training organizations and private companies (see box). All in all, the École de santé numérique will have a budget approaching 8 million euros.

Five out of five

" The call for tenders required us to target at least one of the 5 proposed audiences. We chose to target all five, firstly because we have a history of training in this field in Montpellier, and secondly because we want to lay the foundations for a center of excellence in digital health training, which will become a national benchmark. " Future healthcare professionals are of course concerned, whether they are students in medicine, pharmacy, odontology, maieutics, health professions or nursing training institutes, or whether they are destined for paramedical professions such as physiotherapist or occupational therapist, or even professionals in adapted physical activity coming from STAPS...

Next come digital specialists (engineering sciences, technology specialists, etc.), managers of health and social care structures, legal experts, because " we need specialists in digital health law to support and protect patients, professionals and establishments using digital health ", explains Maurice Hayot, and finally, expert professionals capable of certifying digital medical application devices , "something France sorely lacks if it is to become an international leader", he adds.

Named ESNbyUM for "Ecole de santé numérique de l'Université de Montpellier", this school " is not to be taken as a school in the strict sense of the term, but rather in the sense of 'making school' by transmitting generic or specific skills to each audience, some of which constitute a core knowledge reference defined by the Ministry of Health, through the Ministerial Delegation for Digital Health " continues Maurice Hayot. In concrete terms, for undergraduate health students, these will be blocks of skills integrated into current courses for widespread implementation from the start of the 2023 academic year. These will cover health data, cybersecurity, digital health tools, telehealth and health communication. For graduate and post-graduate students, or for professionals enrolled in continuing education programs, customized modules tailored to their professional practices and specialties will be offered over the course of the year.

6P Pedagogy

"Personalized" is one of the key words in the pedagogy designed and developed for this training by Maurice Hayot's team. " Our objective with ESNbyUM is to create an innovative and effective pedagogical model for training professionals to practice humanistic digital health, a model that can be transposed to other cities. We want to develop and deploy a 'precision pedagogy' where everyone can acquire the skills they precisely need for their practice, depending on their initial background, availability or geographical location in the region," insists the professor. This method, dubbed "Pédagogie-6P", rests on six pillars: Personalized; Preventive " i.e., preventing people from abandoning their practice due to insufficient training "; Predictive " capable of predicting needs and therefore the digital health professions of tomorrow "; Participative " making learners actors in their choice of learning and their career path "; Evidence-based and Practice-centered.

On a more concrete level, this school will be based on the creation of a digital campus where students and professionals in training will have access to different areas: discovery of the lexicon linked to digital health, challenges between students/learners, e-lab linked to the business world, resources for becoming a trainer yourself, and exchanges with and between citizens. " This last innovative space was designed in conjunction with the Institut d'administration des entreprises (IAE) to enable people from different professions or specialities to work together on the same project. In today 's digital age, healthcare professionals can no longer work in isolation; they need to interact with engineers, lawyers, etc.," Maurice Hayot points out. Funded for a five-year period, ESNbyUM aims to become the new French training model for emerging healthcare professions.

They support ESNbyUM: