The Learning Lab for Laboratory Medicine on NEJM Knowledge+ program recently hit a major milestone! Over 10,000 individuals from 149 countries are currently using this program; 80% of users are from outside the United States. This cloud-based program consists of >115advancedcourses and >80 courses for practicing Medical Laboratory Specialists, covering topics that span across all disciplines of laboratory medicine(https://area9lyceum.com/laboratorymedicine/). The entire program is free of charge for individual users to eliminate financial barriers and is endorsed and promoted by IFCC.

The courses are based on the concept of adaptive learning, the closest to personalized education. Adaptive learning is an ingenious way to communicate information. Through sophisticated computer algorithms, the platform interacts with the learner and identifies the areas in which they are not proficient. It then provides targeted learning materials to remedy the deficiency, thus enabling efficient learning in small blocks of time. The program can be accessed via mobile devices for added flexibility.

Over 130 leading clinical laboratory scientists and physicians from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Croatia, Italy, South Africa, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Singapore have built these courses. Each course consists of ~100 granular learning objectives; every learning objective is coupled with one to two probes and a learning resource. The probes are the actual questions and can be presented in one of nine different formats that meant to be engaging and interesting to the learner. Each course goes through a rigorous internal and external Review process followed by a beta testing evaluation. Over 300 laboratory medicine professionals have participated in reviewing and performing the beta testing evaluation of these courses. This program has been designed for laboratory medicine professionals in hospital and commercial laboratories as well as the in vitro diagnostics industry to help them to assess their knowledge, remain abreast with current knowledge, and prepare for certification exams. Currently, this program is only available in English. However, efforts are underway to have the entire program translated to Chinese, both simplified and traditional, Japanese, French, Arabic, and Bahasa Indonesia. The Chinese and French websites will be launched in mid-2023; the other languages will follow shortly. Discussions are currently underway to also include Spanish and Portuguese versions. As daunting as these efforts are, they are essential to increase accessibility of this program throughout the world and to enable those who are not comfortable with English to benefit from it. This ambitious program is a collaborative effort between New England Journal of Medicine Group, AACC, and Area9 Lyceum, a global leader in education technology. IFCC YS and all other laboratory medicine professionals worldwide are strongly encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity and join the over 10,000 users of this program.