From Aron’s Desk

Friends,

Next week, we open the new Virtual Health System here at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. It is an amazing facility where we can simulate the arrival of patients to an emergency department, then have them go to the trauma bay, the operating room, or the labor and delivery suite, and then go on to the intensive care unit or regular hospital bed and then finally follow them up in the outpatient clinic. Along the way, they receive care from interprofessional teams of students. They might see physician assistant and counseling students or go into surgery with nurse anesthesia, podiatry, or medicine students with the specimens going to our pathology assistant students. As they recover in their hospital room they might see physical therapy or pharmacy students. In outpatient follow-up, they might see a psychology student or nursing student.

The facility is astonishing and makes it possible for our interprofessional curricula to engage in a wide variety of simulated patient interactions for interdisciplinary teams. In my previous roles I’ve played a large part in designing three simulation centers, and I have seen many simulation centers across the country. RFU has one of the most integrated and comprehensive centers I have seen. The military medicine simulation center had the most bells and whistles (and a helicopter), but good simulation is not about helicopters.

Everyone who has learned a new skill, like picking up a musical instrument or playing a new sport, knows that they need repetitions to get good at the skill. And, it is better if your recital performance is not part of your practice session.

Most of the time, we use simulation to give students the chance to practice skills without burdening patients with the time or risk of being with a novice learner. It is pretty much expected that students will first learn to take a history and physical from a standardized patient (a paid actor), who is depicting a particular condition or set of circumstances. While faculty can observe and give feedback based on the encounter, the simulated patient often gives the best feedback to the student.

At the other end of the teaching process, we use simulation to do assessments, including determination of competency, entrustment, and certification. Sometimes the assessments are simple, like accurately taking the blood pressure of a high fidelity manikin that has a pressure we can set. Sometimes the task is more complicated. We ask students to complete an examination that has eight patient cases in which they are assessed for taking the right history, doing the proper physical examination correctly, and writing up a good chart note for the encounter. Our nurse anesthesia students are observed and graded/certified doing the induction of anesthesia from soup (the intake and assessments) to nuts (the intubation and anesthesia agents). While I highlighted nurse anesthesia in this example, the same is true for how we engage and assess learners from all of our clinical programs at RFU. This is so much better for learners and patients than the see one, do one, teach one days when the vast majority of “practice” was on actual patients.

We’ve been using the Virtual Health System spaces as they come online, and I had the pleasure of watching our nurse anesthesia students do one of their first assessments just a couple of weeks ago. It is a great training facility, which will be good for our students and their patients. I want to thank Governor JB Pritzker, the Illinois General Assembly, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and the Illinois Board of Higher Education for providing the majority of the capital funding for this space through the Independent Colleges Capital Investment Grant Program. Thanks also to the Nemhauser Trust  as well as an anonymous foundation for their generous support of the project. We owe a great debt to our interim provost James Carlson for leading the effort to create this facility stretching back to his days as Associate Provost for Innovation and Vice President for Interprofessional Education and Simulation. Jim’s team in the Baldwin Institute and its Center for Advanced Simulation in Healthcare continue to innovate and are working to help students prepare for a health care environment that is navigating the benefits and struggles of digital health growth and AI assisted patient care.

I want to give a quick shout-out to the RFU football team: Go Helices! Gotta love it when the crowd gets angry and starts shouting “Helix U” at the refs. I see the sports media has reduced its sports coverage to “expert polls” about who will win MVP awards, and in that reductionist spirit, after deep discussions with the President’s Cabinet this week, I am going to go out on a limb with two presidential predictions for our football season: 1) we will be undefeated, and 2) I will be one of the few presidents with no football players who get CTE. Enjoy the festivities and catch Topo (Topoisomerase) the Wonder Dog, who leaps to catch both frisbees and beta-pleated sheets.

Improving the wellness of all people with you,

Aron