Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
Arthur C. Clark¹

For someone suffering from acute urinary retention, nothing spells relief quite like a catheter. Today’s catheters are safe, indispensable diagnostic and treatment tools in many specialties, but the history of the catheter belongs to urology—and the process of draining a painfully distended bladder dates to antiquity. Catheterization is one of civilization’s first therapeutic interventions.²

Urology has always been a field of innovation, but when and how to apply innovation into medical practice will depend on the education and training around the innovation and the access to these newer technologies by the health care team. In 2019, the New Technologies and Imaging Committee (NTIC) of the AUA Office of Education started to use technology adoption life cycles to organize technologies and therapeutic options in a way that educational needs could be better identified.

The technology adoption cycle uses the bell curve system to categorize 5 types of groups and how they react to adopting, accepting, and using new kinds of implemented technology in a business environment (Figure). The 5 types of groups are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Business leaders with an understanding of the technology adoption life cycle can tailor their marketing efforts to the needs of specific groups and gain a competitive advantage.³

Figure. The standard business adoption cycle. Figure created by Wesley Fryer and used with permission of flickr under a CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).

With all of that being said, the model also works with structuring a system of when and what type of education to provide in support of new technologies or therapeutic options. Jumping right to a hands-on skills training course may not be appropriate when the majority of practice sites do not have access to the technology. To operationalize this model, the Office of Education NTIC, a group of experts, first identified all of the technologies in areas such as imaging, benign prostatic hyperplasia, endourology, focal therapies, prostate biomarkers, and prostate genomic tests and plotted them along the adoption curve. Thereafter, to ensure that their decisions aligned with AUA’s larger membership, educational needs assessment surveys were developed and fielded which gathered data to support or question the expert’s placement of the technologies on the curve. For example, an expert in an area is more likely to be an innovator and early adopter and therefore may advocate for education that is not appropriate for the majority of their peers.

To support our educational mission, members of the NTIC present this educational needs assessment data to the Education Council and use it to make recommendations for Annual Meeting content, helping to guide whether a topic is more appropriate for a plenary session (Innovators-Early Adopters), instructional course (Early Majority), or hands-on skills training (Early Majority-Late Majority).

The system is not foolproof, but rather provides a general framework for AUA leadership to make decisions.

I would like to thank Dr Tim Brand and all of the members of the NTIC for their contributions to our robust library of adoption cycles. If you have any questions or recommendations, please email education@auanet.org. We welcome an open dialogue with our members.