iPads, iBooks, Apps! What\u27s all the iFuss about?

The iVolution is here. It is iThis and iThat every way you turn. Is this just another iFad, or is it truly revolutionizing education? In a recent survey conducted by EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research on undergraduates and technology, 31% of students reported owning tablet technology a 15% increase from the previous year and 76% of students reported owning smart phones. This finding was a 14% increase from the previous year. Students also reported using smart devices in class to access material, participate in activities, look up information and photograph material as learning strategies. Thomas Jefferson University is riding the iWave and taking strides to better integrate technology at all levels of medical training; leading the forefront of the iVolution, syllabi, course materials, and textbooks are now delivered in some of our courses via iPads. In the past few years, the Jefferson Health Mentors Program has embraced the use of new technologies, including Wikis, online discussion boards, Google docs, and Skype platforms to facilitate asynchronous IPE interactions. These platforms have helped to promote IPE by easing scheduling logistics and by allowing students to collaborate electronically on team-based assignments. Over the past summer, JCIPE, the Jefferson Health Mentors Program (JHMP), faculty from Jefferson Medical College and the School of Health Professions, Academic & Instructional Support & Resources (AISR) and Jeff Information Technology (IT) assembled a working group and developed yet another innovative tool to better integrate technology into our IPE efforts – the product was a new iBook, entitled “Assessing Patient Safety.

A Qualitative Analysis of Student Understanding of Team Function Through the use of the Jefferson Teamwork Observation Guide (JTOG)

Background: Several early IOM reports identified the need to educate medical and health professions students in delivering patient-centered care as members of interprofessional teams (IOM, 2001; IOM, 2003). Evidence shows that conducting interprofessional education during education and training prepares student learners for collaborative practice when they enter the workplace, which in turn helps to achieve the Triple Aim of 1) enhancing the patient experience; 2) improving the health of populations; and 3) decreasing costs (WHO, 2010; Berwick, et al., 2008). One way to prepare students for collaborative practice is to have them observe real teams in action. Thus, the Jefferson Teamwork Observation Guide (JTOG) was created to serve as an educational tool in aiding students to better recognize the characteristics of effective teams. It has since been used to assess teams in the majority of clinical observation, simulation and collaborative practice activities offered by Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Education (JCIPE). The JTOG is a two-part assessment comprised of identifiable characteristics of well-functioning teams drawn from the literature about teamwork. The first part consists of Likert Scale questions (strongly disagree to strongly agree) regarding the behavior of the interprofessional team observed in the domains of Values/Ethics in Interprofessional Practice, Roles/Responsibilities, Interprofessional Communication, Teams and Teamwork, and Leadership (IPEC, 2011; IPEC 2016). The second part includes qualitative questions relating to team-based care, patient-centered care, and teamwork

From the Editors

As the spring semester comes to a close, we in the Jefferson Center for InterProfessional Education (JCIPE) reflect on the last year. In the Fall 2014 edition of the Interprofessional Education and Care Newsletter, we presented several innovative IPE projects from students, faculty and our colleagues overseas. The articles in this edition build on that progress, high-lighting our efforts, redefined during a January 2015 Jefferson IPE retreat facilitated by Dr. Malcolm Cox, to more closely link IPE and clinical practice. To this end, the spring semester marked the conclusion of the first administration of our revised Jefferson Health Mentors Program (JHMP) Module 4. During the new module, students select one Learning Activity from a menu of 13 offerings, including clinical observations, simulations and collaborative practice opportunities. They then reflect on their participation in their selected Learning Activity in light of their experience with their Health Mentor. Two student essays, one discussing our new, student-led IPE Grand Rounds program detailed in the Fall 2014 edition of the newsletter and the other describing a TeamSTEPPS® training, demonstrate the impact of such clinically-focused activities and their application in students’ training and lives

Implementation, evaluation, and recommendations for extension of AHRQ Common Formats to capture patient- and carepartner-generated safety data

Abstract Objectives The Common Formats, published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, represent a standard for safety event reporting used by Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs). We evaluated its ability to capture patient-reported safety events. Materials and methods We formally evaluated gaps between the Common Formats and a safety concern reporting system for use by patients and their carepartners (ie friends/families) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Results Overall, we found large gaps between Common Formats (versions 1.2, 2.0) and our patient/carepartner reporting system, with only 22–30% of the data elements matching. Discussion We recommend extensions to the Common Formats, including concepts that capture greater detail about the submitter and safety categories relevant to unsafe conditions and near misses that patients and carepartners routinely observe. Conclusion Extensions to the Common Formats could enable more complete safety data sets and greater understanding of safety from key stakeholder perspectives, especially patients, and carepartners. </jats:sec

From the Editors

Welcome to the Spring 2014 edition of the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Education (JCIPE) newsletter. In this edition of our newsletter, you will have a chance to read about two new innovations in technology designed to enhance interprofessional education and collaborative practice. We believe that integrating technology into IPE will be central to aligning health care education reforms with changes in healthcare delivery. This Spring also marks the graduation of our 6th cohort of JHMP students at TJU. Now, over 4,100 students have completed this longitudinal IPE curriculum; feedback from graduates has been highly positive, detailing the impact of IPE experiences in better preparing them for teamwork as well as providing them with an unexpected advantage in employment opportunities, where competency as an effective team player is highly valued by employers

From the Editors

This fall has seen a flurry of activity at the Jefferson Center for InterProfessional Education (JCIPE). In September, Lauren Collins, MD, Associate Director of JCIPE, was selected as one of five recipients of the prestigious Macy Faculty Scholars (MFS) program, a two-year career development award supported by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. She now joins a national network of other MFS recipients in helping to re-envision training of health professions students and delivery of collaborative care. Elizabeth Speakman, EdD, RN, ANEF, FNAP, JCIPE Co-Director, completed her three-year Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellowship and was recently selected to attend the Institute of Medicine Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action Summit 2015. In addition, Nethra Ankam, MD, from the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and Sidney Kimmel Medical College, and Tracey Vause Earland, MS, OTR/L, from the Department of Occupational Therapy of the College of Health Professions, both longtime faculty champions of IPE at Jefferson, have recently been appointed to serve as the new Co-Directors of the Jefferson Health Mentors Program (JHMP), overseeing dynamic changes in one of our flagship activities

From the Editors

Welcome to the Fall 2014 edition of the Jefferson Interprofessional Education and Care Newsletter. It has been a busy Fall at Jefferson and we are excited to share several new developments which have been pushing the envelope in IPE. In October, we hosted our 4th biennial conference, Interprofessional Care for the 21st Century: Redefining Education and Practice. This year we had a record number of conference participants and presenters joining us from a variety of national and international academic and service organizations. Our keynote speakers, Dr. George Thibault, President, Josiah Macy Jr Foundation; Dr. Barbara Brandt, Director, National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at the University of Minnesota; Dr. John Gilbert, Principal & Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia College of Health Disciplines, Co-Chair of the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative; and a team from the Veterans Administration, including Dr. Malcolm Cox, Dr. Stuart Gilman, Dr. Richard Stark and Dr. Kathryn Rugen, collectively challenged and inspired us to re-conceptualize interprofessional education and collaborative practice opportunities for students as we prepare them for a healthcare delivery system that will focus on the triple aim of improving a patient’s care experience, improving the health of patient populations, and reducing the per capita cost of healthcare. One of the articles that follows will highlight the conference presentation of the innovative work of Dr. Susanne Boyle from the University of Glasgow, Scotland and her colleagues. Dr. Boyle’s team explored the area of augmented reality and its applicability to enhancing online interprofessional education through virtual communities

Vacuum Plane Waves in 4+1 D and Exact solutions to Einstein's Equations in 3+1 D

In this paper we derive homogeneous vacuum plane-wave solutions to Einstein's field equations in 4+1 dimensions. The solutions come in five different types of which three generalise the vacuum plane-wave solutions in 3+1 dimensions to the 4+1 dimensional case. By doing a Kaluza-Klein reduction we obtain solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equations in 3+1 dimensions. The solutions generalise the vacuum plane-wave spacetimes of Bianchi class B to the non-vacuum case and describe spatially homogeneous spacetimes containing an extremely tilted fluid. Also, using a similar reduction we obtain 3+1 dimensional solutions to the Einstein equations with a scalar field.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

Different methodological approaches to the assessment of in vivo efficacy of three artemisinin-based combination antimalarial treatments for the treatment of uncomplicated falciparum malaria in African children.

BACKGROUND: Use of different methods for assessing the efficacy of artemisinin-based combination antimalarial treatments (ACTs) will result in different estimates being reported, with implications for changes in treatment policy. METHODS: Data from different in vivo studies of ACT treatment of uncomplicated falciparum malaria were combined in a single database. Efficacy at day 28 corrected by PCR genotyping was estimated using four methods. In the first two methods, failure rates were calculated as proportions with either (1a) reinfections excluded from the analysis (standard WHO per-protocol analysis) or (1b) reinfections considered as treatment successes. In the second two methods, failure rates were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier product limit formula using either (2a) WHO (2001) definitions of failure, or (2b) failure defined using parasitological criteria only. RESULTS: Data analysed represented 2926 patients from 17 studies in nine African countries. Three ACTs were studied: artesunate-amodiaquine (AS+AQ, N = 1702), artesunate-sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (AS+SP, N = 706) and artemether-lumefantrine (AL, N = 518).Using method (1a), the day 28 failure rates ranged from 0% to 39.3% for AS+AQ treatment, from 1.0% to 33.3% for AS+SP treatment and from 0% to 3.3% for AL treatment. The median [range] difference in point estimates between method 1a (reference) and the others were: (i) method 1b = 1.3% [0 to 24.8], (ii) method 2a = 1.1% [0 to 21.5], and (iii) method 2b = 0% [-38 to 19.3].The standard per-protocol method (1a) tended to overestimate the risk of failure when compared to alternative methods using the same endpoint definitions (methods 1b and 2a). It either overestimated or underestimated the risk when endpoints based on parasitological rather than clinical criteria were applied. The standard method was also associated with a 34% reduction in the number of patients evaluated compared to the number of patients enrolled. Only 2% of the sample size was lost when failures were classified on the first day of parasite recurrence and survival analytical methods were used. CONCLUSION: The primary purpose of an in vivo study should be to provide a precise estimate of the risk of antimalarial treatment failure due to drug resistance. Use of survival analysis is the most appropriate way to estimate failure rates with parasitological recurrence classified as treatment failure on the day it occurs