Interprofessional Online Learning Module: Promoting Team Science for Community Health Needs
Purpose/Hypothesis:
The healthcare industry in the United States continues to face significant challenges in providing quality care to all. Healthy People 2020 encourages healthcare professionals to collaboratively focus on the relevance of social determinants and health status to provide person-centered care. The growth in data analytics provides a foundation for health professionals to explore both health status and social determinants that may influence team-based healthcare. Health professionals students need the tools and skill sets to engage fully on this team. Health science educators use PolicyMap, a digital humanities tool, to provide access to demographic, health, and economic variables within an interactive interprofessional online learning module. Health professional students can identify populations at risk, select appropriate social determinants, epidemiological, and health status factors to gain insights specific to the role of interprofessional care within population health and the impact of team science. The purpose of this research report is to provide qualitative data describing students' perspectives and knowledge of policy map, team science, interprofessional education (IPE), and social determinants of health following completion of the online IPE learning module.
Number of Subjects: 20 students
Materials and Methods:
As part of a program review process for the online module, students were asked to anonymously participate in a pre and post module online survey. Several open-ended questions were embedded in the survey to provide insight on students' perspectives and knowledge of policy map, team science, IPE, and social determinate of health pre and post module completion. Qualitative data were obtained from participants’ responses to each of the open-ended survey questions. The answers were used to identify emergent themes. Specifically, two researchers independently reviewed each participants response. Elemental coding method was used to preliminarily review the corpus and generate descriptive codes. Descriptive codes summarize in a word or short phrase the basic topic of a qualitative passage. The two researchers meet to collectively reach consensus on the codes and "Theme the Data."
Results: When reviewing participants pre to post responses to each of the open-ended survey questions, the post module responses were richer and demonstrated expanded awareness of policy map, team science, and social determinate of health.
Conclusions: Interprofessional online learning module, using a digital humanities tool can provide access to demographic, health and economic variables from which health professional students can identify populations at risk, select appropriate social determinants, epidemiological, and health status factors and gain insight on the impact of team science in healthcare.
Clinical Relevance: As educators, we must infuse the Healthy People 2020 vision into the Doctor of Physical Therapy curriculum. Using this online IPE learning module can be an effective teaching and learning strategy to promote its' infusion.