PMID- 28756443 OWN - NLM STAT- MEDLINE DCOM- 20180423 LR - 20181202 IS - 1879-8365 (Electronic) IS - 0926-9630 (Linking) VI - 239 DP - 2017 TI - Enhancing General Practitioners Participation in a Virtual Community of Practice for Continuing Medical Education: An Exploratory Study. PG - 97-103 AB - As sources of medical information grow online, Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs) have evolved into a potential tool that allows General Practitioners (GPs) to interact through the sharing of their experience and knowledge. However, literature reports that GPs are reluctant to participate in VCoPs especially for their continuing medical education (CME). Currently, no study has explored the design and structural aspects of VCoPs that may lead to enhancing GPs' participation in such online communities. Hence, this paper explores how GPs envisage the use of a VCoP for their CME and how to enhance their participation by conducting an exploratory qualitative study of two focus groups with 10 GPs in each group, accompanied by a specialist and a nurse. Our empirical findings identified two key contributions: i) seven themes that need to be incorporated in the VCoP to enable and support GP's CME through the use of a VCoP; ii) three recommendations to take into consideration for researchers when evaluating VCoPs for CME. FAU - Murad, Abdulaziz AU - Murad A AD - School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. FAU - Lederman, Reeva AU - Lederman R AD - School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. FAU - Bosua, Rachelle AU - Bosua R AD - School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. FAU - Chang, Shanton AU - Chang S AD - School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. FAU - Wark, John D AU - Wark JD AD - Department of Medicine (Royal Melbourne Hospital), The University of Melbourne. LA - eng PT - Journal Article PL - Netherlands TA - Stud Health Technol Inform JT - Studies in health technology and informatics JID - 9214582 MH - *Education, Medical, Continuing MH - Focus Groups MH - *General Practitioners MH - Humans MH - *Internet MH - Qualitative Research OTO - NOTNLM OT - Continuing Medical Education OT - Design Considerations OT - General Practitioners OT - Virtual Communities of Practice EDAT- 2017/08/02 06:00 MHDA- 2018/04/24 06:00 CRDT- 2017/07/31 06:00 PHST- 2017/07/31 06:00 [entrez] PHST- 2017/08/02 06:00 [pubmed] PHST- 2018/04/24 06:00 [medline] PST - ppublish SO - Stud Health Technol Inform. 2017;239:97-103.