For Your Health
For Your Health

News from the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences

A busy month for SMHS Department of Education Resources

robots-posterIt has been a busy few months for the SMHS Education Resources team. Below are a few highlights of all the faculty and staff in that department have had going on of late.

Early in November, Drs. Eric Johnson, Pat Carr, Jon Allen, Nancy Vogeltanz-Holm, and Rick Van Eck gave three presentations at the Generalists in Medical Education Conference, which preceded the AAMC national meeting in Austin, Texas. Drs. Johnson, Allen, and Van Eck presented on their ROBOTS project; Drs. Carr, Vogeltanz-Holm, and Van Eck presented a Small Group Learning Competency Assessment Project; and Dr. Van Eck gave a “Pecha Kucha” Ted Talk-style presentation on “What Video Games Can Teach Us About Medical Education,” a longer version of which he will present at the Evidence-Based Teaching Group on December 4.

Dr. Johnson also was involved in the presentation of a poster (entitled “Learning objectives to guide enhancement of chronic disease curricula in undergraduate medical education”) with the AMA Chronic Disease Prevention and Management interest group.

Shortly before these presentations, faculty in the department were awarded a $30,000 AMA Innovation Grant to guide faculty development called “TIPS: Telemedicine for InterProfessional Simulation toolkit.”

And finally, the Education Resources team was selected by the AMA to continue its membership in the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education (ACE) consortium for its project on competency-based curriculum assessment through badging, credentialing, and gamification. The membership will run through 2021.

The consortium provides an innovation ecosystem, allowing schools to continue their projects, investigate new concepts, and impact the national direction of medical education. Membership in this consortium helps the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences remain connected with its peers at other institutions who have also petitioned to remain.

The SMHS project focuses on three initiatives:

  • Gamification and Badging of Interprofessional Collaboration Curriculum
  • Gamification and Badging of Personal and Professional Development Curriculum
  • Integration of Telemedicine from ROBOTS Project into Other Simulations

“We have our work cut out for us,” noted Dr. Van Eck, the David and Lola Rognlie Monson Endowed Chair for Medical Education and associate dean for Teaching & Learning at the SMHS, “but this will be a very exciting and valuable process to build innovative curricula!”