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How Content Management Systems Can Keep Medical Programs Compliant, Brand Strategies Optimized, and Speakers Engaged

 

When was the last time you saw an overhead projector at a medical presentation? Compared with the media-rich presentations that populate the medical education landscape of today, the overheating bulbs, ink-smudged hands, and blurry transparencies of (not very) long ago seem as ancient as the gothic apothecaries and operating theaters of Victorian England. Today, if a speaker wheels in one of those creaky, periscopic dinosaurs, one might assume a presentation on applied leech theory may be in the offing.

Entirely more likely is that the content presented will have been created with PowerPoint. To appreciate the ubiquity of PowerPoint within the healthcare education industry, one need only look to Terry Irwin, a Belfast-based consultant surgeon for the National Health Service who is coauthor of Perfect Medical Presentations and a highly sought after PowerPoint training guru: "PowerPoint is of course the main method of supporting communication at medical meetings, training sessions and in teaching students. It is pretty much universal."[1] 

What is also universal about PowerPoint is an awareness of its security weaknesses and lack of version control. Microsoft’s recently posted Security Bulletin MS11-036 underscores this concern, as the vulnerability in question "could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted PowerPoint file," likely received in an e-mail, resulting in a situation where "a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code on the system with the privileges of the victim or cause the application to crash."[2] PowerPoint’s weaknesses are not solely fodder for superhackers. Under its protocols, locked and protected slides can be altered by even the most minimally tech savvy.

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