Heart Songs 3 provides you with high-quality heart sounds that you can look at and listen to at your convenience to improve your cardiac auscultation skills!
Master heart sounds - basic, intermediate, and complex - with a program designed specifically to help you learn in the way that your brain processes auditory information. Heart Songs 3 is based on psychoacoustic research that's shown intensive repetition (400 to 600 times) to be key, producing a significant improvement in cardiac auscultation in a relatively short time. Once each new sound is mastered, it will be reinforced every time you hear it in a patient.
Modeled after its successful predecessors, Heart Songs 3 includes all the murmurs from the previous version plus images of phonocardiograms, CT scans and even videos of color Doppler echocardiograms! These visual enhancements will facilitate your understanding and mastery of many heart murmurs.
Editor: Michael J. Barrett, MD, FACC
Target Audience: The target audience includes any healthcare professional interested in improving his/her cardiac auscultation skills.
Format:
This program is available online and features three key sections:
- Heart Songs in MPEG-4 files for use on devices that support this video format
- Heart Songs in MP3 files (audio only) for use on any MP3 player that does not support video.
- Interactive online quizzes.
Research Basis for Heart Songs
"Research demonstrates that practice makes perfect when trying to master cardiac auscultation. Listening to these 'Heart Songs' at the computer or iPod can help clinicians at every level refine their auscultation skills." - Michael J. Barrett, MD, FACC
Cardiac auscultation has traditionally been taught as if it were an intellectual skill, with a didactic lecture followed by a brief demonstration of heart sounds. This approach has yielded disappointing results, with most clinicians able to recognize only about 40% of abnormal heart sounds. Heart Songs, on the other hand, is based on psychoacoustic research demonstrating that intensive repetition (400 to 600 times) is required for the human brain to master a new sound. This degree of repetition is necessary for the formation of an auditory template of each new sound. Once each new sound is mastered, it is reinforced each time you hear it in a patient. By using this learning principle from psychoacoustic research, Heart Songs produces a significant improvement in cardiac auscultation in a relatively short time. Two controlled trials1,2 have shown that proficiency in cardiac auscultation routinely exceeds 80% using this approach.
Heart Songs 3 provides you with high-quality heart sounds that you can listen to at your convenience so you can improve your cardiac auscultation skills.
Heart Songs in the News
June 4, 2007 Capitalizing on a craze: Medicine on an MP3 (AMA News)
Mar 14, 2006 A Virtual Classroom Is Superior to Traditional Training in Teaching Cardiac Auscultation (ACC 06)
Jan 30, 2006 Heart Songs: Young doctors are losing their stethoscope skills (Time)
Jan 2006 The power of repetition in mastering cardiac auscultation (Am J Med)
References:
1. Barrett MJ, Lacey CS, Sekara AE, Linden EA, Gracely EJ. Mastering cardiac murmurs: the power of repetition. Chest 2004;126:470-5.
2. Barrett MJ, Kuzma MA, Seto TC, et al. The power of repetition in mastering cardiac auscultation. Amer J Med 2006;119:73-5.