Is Tech Friend or Foe in Healthcare?

This post is provided by guest blogger, Michelle Edwards, graduate student University of St. Francis, MS Training and Development program.

Current and future technologies are impacting healthcare. In particular, this article focused on the computerized patient order entry (CPOE) programs. This process is used by clinicians to enter and send treatment instructions electronically through a CPOE application; previously this was done by paper. These applications were created in hopes to improve patient safety to help alleviate wrong- dosing, wrong medication, wrong route and wrong delivery.

The article explains how there remains many flaws with these applications from many programs not having the ability to recognize an incorrect entry by a clinician. (E.g.) An error in the keystroke such as future dating for a year away, there should flag that alerts the clinician requiring them to verify for things like this. The article mentioned a pharmacist set a medication start date for a year away instead of the next morning these things could not only cause a delay a care but could lead up to and include an untimely death. Alarm and alert fatigue, currently clinicians override the system alerts and although only about 10% were incorrectly overridden, when we speak in term of patient lives even 1% is too many. These errors can impact patient outcomes tremendously. 

The author mentioned AI being introduced into healthcare and how this will present challenges; AI tends to learn behaviors this could lead to the AI making decisions without the clinician being involved, as a clinician in healthcare myself this sounds so scary. I will say from the overall tone of the article technology has brought us so far but truly we have so far to go and still face many challenges that we need to explore with current technologies and the future technologies on the rise and to stay on top of these things. I will personally say that within the next 3 years there will be new jobs in healthcare that will deal with these exact issues. 

Reference

 Holmgren, J., McBride, S., Gale, B, & Mossburg, S. (2023, March 29). Technology as a tool for improving patient safety. Patient Safety Network. Retrieved from: https://psnet.ahrq.gov/perspective/technology-tool-improving-patient-safety#:~:text=Introduction,cost%20across%20all%20healthcare%20settings. 

Assessing Micro-Learning in a Healthcare Education Environment

This post is provided by guest blogger, Theresa Anderson, graduate student University of St. Francis, MS Training and Development program.

This article on the healthcare education micro-learning environment measure (HEMLEM) is a research article aimed at creating an evidence-based measurement tool for assessing clinical micro-learning environments across several healthcare professional student groups. The authors suggest there may be gaps between what healthcare professional students should be learning and what they learn. The authors took a mixed methods approach to create a micro-learning environment measure. They acknowledge that teaching quality, staff attitudes, and behaviors are critical for a good micro-learning environment. 

The article is helpful for anyone attempting to measure how micro-learning within the education of a healthcare professional environment affects students’ learning. The authors created a measurement tool through a step-wise approach: literature analyzing existing tools, generating new items through thematic analysis of student experiences, the Delphi process involving healthcare educators, piloting the prototype, and item reduction. The item reduction tool was a twelve-question survey of the students with differing healthcare professions. HEMLEM seems to be an efficient way to measure success or what needs to be improved in a micro-learning environment. 

References

Isba, R., Rousseva, C., Wolf, K., & Byrne-Davis, L. (2020). Development of a brief learning environment measure for use in healthcare professions education: The healthcare education micro learning environment measure (HEMLEM). BMC Medical Education20(110). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-01996-8

Case Based Learning in Radiology Education

This post is provided by guest blogger, Nicole Fischer, CNMT, graduate student University of St. Francis, MS Training and Development program

There are many pathways that learners can take to fulfill knowledge gaps related to personal interests as well as professional endeavors. While much value is still placed on traditional face to face lectures, the implementation of innovative teaching strategies Continue reading