Bauman Facilitates Innovation Workshop at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine

This past week Dr. Eric B. Bauman was honored to attend the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dr. Bauman was invited to facilitate and moderate a workshop on innovation by Dr. Pam Jeffries, Dean and Professor of the George Washington University School of Nursing and Patricia Cuff, Director of the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education at the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine. The  Workshop included hands-on demonstrations of new developments in contemporary healthcare education, as well as rapid-fire presentations and roundtable discussions focused on leveraging innovation to address challenges found throughout healthcare education.

The workshop featured a panel of innovators with expertise in virtual and augmented reality, game-based learning, simulation, and multimedia educational solutions.

During the roundtable discussions, innovators and forum delegates were encouraged by Dr. Bauman to describe how they might leverage other forms of the novel technologies demonstrated at the workshop to solve real-world challenges found in health professions education.

Interesting insights:

  • Dan Norton, CCO of Filament Games from Madison, Wisconsin discussed best practices in educational game design. Norton emphasized that without well a well-defined problem, there is no solution.
  • Dr. Andrea Parodi, Research Associate Professor from the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center at Old Dominion University emphasized that “being really smart, but really slow” when it comes to critical care still has devastating impacts for critically ill and injured patients. Dr. Parodi urged delegates to consider how to use technology not only as a tool to train clinicians, but also to ensure that clinicians maintained demonstrable, situationally appropriate clinical expertise.
  • Geoff Miller, from Eastern Virginia Medical School, urged delegates to promote policy that democratizes expertise. In Miller’s vision, educators leverage innovation to ensure access to critical skill development and knowledge acquisition opportunities within and across the health professions and the various settings in which care will be delivered.
  • Angela Robert, from PeriopSim demonstrated a multimedia solution for training operating room scrub nurses that included both a mobile iPad training application coupled with an immersive Virtual Reality learning experience.

Innovation is a dynamic and fluid process that includes simulation, game-based teaching and learning, and by extension virtual reality and augmented reality, as well a host of rapidly emerging mobile delivery systems to support educational opportunities across the health professions to the benefit of patient populations.

Innovators participating in the workshop included: