Jennifer R. Hur, Debra Litzelman, and Curtis Wright, IU School of Medicine
Principal Investigator: Jennifer R. Hur, assistant professor of clinical medicine, Department of Medicine, IU School of Medicine
Co-principal Investigators: Debra Litzelman, associate dean for research in medical education, professor of medicine, IU School of Medicine and Curtis Wright, assistant professor of clinical medicine, IU School of Medicine
Project Title: Bringing clinical teaching on the Internal Medicine wards into the 21st century with INSPIRE (INtegrated Supportive Presentations for Internal medicine Rotation Educators)
Funding Level: $10,000
Abstract:
Traditionally, medical students and new graduates from medical school study both content and application of medical knowledge at patients’ bedside, directly guided by their clinical faculty. Time was dedicated for the teaching of medical knowledge as well as careful observation of bedside physical examination technique.
The last decade has seen the introduction of student work-hour time restrictions, the exponential growth of information that physicians are expected to master, and pressure to reduce the time a patient spends in the hospital. All of these factors have contributed to a growing sense that our traditional models of teaching medical knowledge and bedside diagnosis are no longer feasible and new tools need to be developed to ensure that our curricula are effectively and efficiently taught to our students.
Mobile technology’s applications for healthcare have been well described in the last 2 decades, as have applications in the classroom. Despite these innovations, the potential benefits of mobile technology for clinical bedside teaching remain alluring but largely untested. We plan to develop an electronic, mobile tool for clinician educators to more easily, efficiently, and consistently teach clinical knowledge and bedside skills on the inpatient general medical wards. We then propose a pilot study to examine feasibility of our intervention tool, effect on satisfaction among our teachers and learners, and impact of our tool on objective measures of teaching and learning of clinical content. We expect this to lead to eventual studies of the impact of our educational tool on actual patient outcomes.
