The Dyad Model for Interprofessional Academic Patient Aligned Care Teams.

Combining interprofessional education, clinical or workplace learning, and physician resident teachers in the ambulatory setting, the dyad model enhances teamwork skills and increases nurse practitioner students' clinical competence.

Population medicine in a curricular revision at Case Western Reserve.

Inclusion of population medicine in a medical school curriculum has received growing attention. Recently, the Association of American Medical Colleges has highlighted this issue through support of the Regional Medicine and Public Health Education Centers initiative. The Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine joined this consortium while implementing a new curriculum in which population medicine would be an underlying theme woven with the classic science elements of disease. The organization for the first two years of the new curriculum, which was implemented in 2006, is a six-block structure during which the basic sciences are learned with key concepts of population medicine woven throughout. The focus for this article is Block One, in which population medicine is the major emphasis of the introduction to medicine. The first week, students learn social determinants, impact on communities, and social aspects of diabetes mellitus, even before addressing a patient's clinical presentation. Emphasis on student-centered learning is undertaken as part of the new curriculum, using a series of weekly, case-based, small-group sessions. This type of group learning is used throughout Block One as students encounter key components of population medicine. A thesis requirement was also introduced as a mechanism to emphasize research with opportunities for research in population medicine as well as other medical sciences. A variety of mechanisms are described to measure the outcomes of Block One.

Starting With Lucy: Focusing on Human Similarities Rather Than Differences to Address Health Care Disparities.

PROBLEM: Multicultural or cultural competence education to address health care disparities using the traditional categorical approach can lead to inadvertent adverse consequences. Nontraditional approaches that address these drawbacks while promoting humanistic care are needed. APPROACH: In September 2014, the Cleveland VA Medical Center's Center of Excellence in Primary Care Education Transforming Outpatient Care (CoEPCE-TOPC) collaborated with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) to develop the Original Identity program, which uses a biocultural anthropologic framework to help learners recognize and address unconscious bias and starts with a discussion of humans' shared origins. The program comprises a two-hour initial learning session at the CMNH (consisting of an educational tour in a museum exhibit, a didactic and discussion section, and patient case studies) and a one-hour wrap-up session at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. OUTCOMES: The authors delivered the complete Original Identity program four times between March and November 2015, with 30 CoEPCE-TOPC learners participating. Learners' mean ratings (n = 29; response rate: 97%) for the three initial learning session questions were consistently high (4.2-4.6) using a five-point scale. Comments to an open-ended question and during the audio-recorded wrap-up sessions also addressed the program objectives and key elements (e.g., bias, assumptions, stereotyping). NEXT STEPS: The authors are completing additional qualitative analysis on the wrap-up session transcriptions to clarify factors that make the program successful, details of learners' experience, and any interprofessional differences in interpreting content. The authors believe this innovative addition to health care education warrants further research.

Feasibility of real-time satisfaction surveys through automated analysis of patients' unstructured comments and sentiments.

This article shows how sentiment analysis (an artificial intelligence procedure that classifies opinions expressed within the text) can be used to design real-time satisfaction surveys. To improve participation, real-time surveys must be radically short. The shortest possible survey is a comment card. Patients' comments can be found online at sites organized for rating clinical care, within e-mails, in hospital complaint registries, or through simplified satisfaction surveys such as "Minute Survey." Sentiment analysis uses patterns among words to classify a comment into a complaint, or praise. It further classifies complaints into specific reasons for dissatisfaction, similar to broad categories found in longer surveys such as Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. In this manner, sentiment analysis allows one to re-create responses to longer satisfaction surveys from a list of comments. To demonstrate, this article provides an analysis of sentiments expressed in 995 online comments made at the RateMDs.com Web site. We focused on pediatrician and obstetrician/gynecologist physicians in District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. We were able to classify patients' reasons for dissatisfaction and the analysis provided information on how practices can improve their care. This article reports the accuracy of classifications of comments. Accuracy will improve as the number of comments received increases. In addition, we ranked physicians using the concept of time-to-next complaint. A time-between control chart was used to assess whether time-to-next complaint exceeded historical patterns and therefore suggested a departure from norms. These findings suggest that (1) patients' comments are easily available, (2) sentiment analysis can classify these comments into complaints/praise, and (3) time-to-next complaint can turn these classifications into numerical benchmarks that can trace impact of improvements over time. The procedures described in the article show that real-time satisfaction surveys are possible.