Moderated by Virginia Uhley
Session Coordinator: Michael Herr

AWARD NOMINEE
Presentation 1 - An Interactive Simulation on Accessing Healthcare in the US
Kenneth Janda    
University of Houston

Purpose
To familiarize students with health insurance concepts and the challenges of accessing care depending on insurance type (or lack thereof), we developed an educational simulation as part of the Physicians, Patients, and Populations course. 

Methods
Designed for 1st-year medical students, the 120-minute simulation provides 10 personas for students to take on, with personas varying by age, gender, work status, income, immigration status, and other variables. In the first of 4 rounds, the personas seek health insurance given their demographic characteristics. The simulation offers multiple choices including the employer's HR Department, insurance agents/brokers, online government resources, and family/friends. At the end of this round, 1+ end up uninsured. In round 2, each persona reports an acute medical situation and seeks care using the insurance card obtained in round 1. The simulation offers multiple locations for each persona to try to receive care (e.g. doctor's office, emergency room, calling 911, or a community health center). In round 3, we model whether the acute condition improves following the receipt of care. In round 4, personas calculate the out-of-pocket cost of their care based on insurance type, where care was accessed, and outcomes. 

Results
Requests for and satisfaction with the program have grown each year. Overall, student feedback was positive (4.5/5). In a class of 30, 3 different people play using the same persona and often end up with different results. Scholars emphasized the different health and financial outcomes that arise from the process.

Conclusion
Simulations like these facilitate learning, allow for a practical application, and foster critical thinking on healthcare access.

Presentation 2 - Medical Education: Creating a Video Game Bridging Basic Science Mechanisms and Clinical Relevance
Blaine Traylor    
Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

Purpose
To develop a novel basic science medical teaching platform using video gamification. Our platform facilitates medical students' ability to connect cellular mechanisms and patient outcomes within the context of disease progression of bacterial sepsis. Students were provided real-time feedback on their game answer choices while playing the game allowing students to assess their competency in basic science pathways. Our hypothesis is that this new teaching platform will provide real-time, low-risk feedback to medical students in connecting cellular pathways to disease progression and clinical outcomes.

Methods
An interactive, branch-point decision-making platform was developed by a team of medical students, hospitalists and medical science faculty members. Second-year medical students (72) were eligible to voluntarily participate in the sepsis teaching program online. Each medical student's decision in the video game was scored by its potential to alter clinical variables of length and cost of hospital stay and risk of patient mortality. Each decision point measured a key conceptual step in immunological cascades involved in sepsis. A "correct" answer lowered each clinical outcome value whereas "incorrect" answers increased the values. Students could monitor results of each decision via a real-time clinical value bar on the screen.

Results
In total, there were 30 unique completions of the clinical scenario with a wide range of results for the three clinical data inputs. The "best" clinical values by a player were 4.9 days hospitalized, $48,510 cost of stay and 12% mortality rate. Multiple wrong answers yielded worse case clinical values of 15.8 days hospitalized, $157,689 cost of stay and 118% mortality rate.

Conclusions
This learning modality demonstrated 1) real-time assessment of medical students' knowledge of cellular basis of sepsis; 2) the game provided a low-stakes, rewards-based learning assessment; and 3) enables learning competency to be measured before a high-stakes examination.

Presentation 3 - Using Technology to Augment Professional Development Offerings in a Resource Scarce Country
Meredith Ratliff    
University of Central Florida College of Medicine

Purpose
To develop a technology-based professional development program for medical education faculty in a resource-scarce country facilitated by platform-based learning.

Methods
A needs assessment was conducted to determine institutional, faculty, and student needs and to suggest potential solutions. The school has placed an institutional priority on technology and student-centered learning while using platform-based technology to deliver high quality content to students efficiently and economically. The faculty ranged in experience from being very new to teaching to decades of experience, and while some were tech savvy, some tended to avoid tech. Optimal skills, knowledge, and dispositions were identified using the IAMSE Educator portfolio and principles from the science of learning.

Results
The professional development (PD) plan developed has taken multiple facets including one-on-one on-site support, the continuation of on-site PD offerings, the development of self-paced technical skills modules, and the addition of platform-based lessons and workshops with educational specialists. One-on-one support helps faculty target individual technical skills while the self-paced modules target context-specific platform integration. The platform-based lessons are self-paced while the workshops are delivered synchronously and remotely. Both platform-based offerings have been developed by educational specialists to target pedagogical needs and platform integration. The continuation of on-site PD offerings helps faculty build pedagogical skills while fostering a sense of collaboration and scholarly pursuit.

Conclusion
PD can be complex and a single solution is unlikely to meet all needs. Utilizing technology and self-paced lessons allows for cost-effective training that targets the learners' needs while allowing for flexibility in busy schedules. Offering live training on-site and as remote workshops allows for project-based, hands-on, collaborative experiences that have been shown effective for PD in medical education.
 

AWARD NOMINEE
Presentation 4 - Crosstalk Between Online and Classroom Medical Education: The HMX Experience at UAG Medical Programs
Maria G. Zavala-Cerna    
Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara

Purpose
COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to change the delivery of the medical curriculum via online exclusively. Some important findings after this experience recapitulate on the possibility to continue with this form of curriculum delivery at least partially to reinforce the education delivered in a traditional form in our classrooms. Our purpose was to provide information on the use of e-learning as an additional tool for the delivery of the medical curriculum at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara.

Methods
We underwent a cross sectional study to report on the outcomes achieved after a 3-year experience of exposure to online delivery of 5 HMX basic courses: Immunology, Genetics, Physiology, Biochemistry and Pharmacology. The courses were designed and instructed remotely by Harvard Medical School Professors and were offered to our students as optional resources to be taken along the medical curriculum.

Results
We included results from 1496 students enrolled either in the Latino or the international program. We had 2456 course enrollments. All students gained significant knowledge when comparing pre course to post course scores, even though the gaining was different for each course. The self-rated benefit of learning and understanding, was also improved in all five courses, although not all students obtained a certificate of completion or achievement. More importantly we could identify gaps in our medical curriculum on topics that were difficulty understood by students. Importantly these topics were different for both programs.

Conclusion
All students gained knowledge when comparing pre course scores to post course scores differences with respect to courses might be related to the semester in which the student was taking the course. The information driven by the analysis of topics, highlights the possibility of having an external source for curriculum evaluation.