March 11 - Article Review #4

The Doctor’s New Black Bag:Instructional Technology and the Tools of the 21st Century Physician

 

Citation: Mostaghimi, A., Levison, J., Leffert, R., Ham, W., Nathoo, A., Halamka, J., Prout, C., Arky, R., Tosteson, D., & Quattrochi, J. (2006). The doctor’s new black bag: instructional technology and the tools of the 21st century physician. Medical Education Online, 11. Retrieved from http://www.med-ed-online.org/pdf/L0000012.pdf

 

Review: Physicians will have to work and communicate with colleagues from various disciplines. Future physicians can expect even more collaboration than in the past. Currently there is more of a focus on collaboration because of developments in academic medicine and biomedical research. However, this has not transferred over to medical education. The writers of this paper have taken this opportunity as a challenge, to change medical school curricula to include leadership and collaboration skills as well as professional and ethical education. Even the focus on problem-based learning has not led to the forging of interdisciplinary relationships. What does this have to do with technology? New technologies are being used to simulate situations that enable students to develop interdisciplinary thought processes. The researchers developed a user-defined, interactive case-based online network with the hope of improving the teamwork skills of medical students. Cases in this network progress in real-time just as real patients' cases would. This facilitates discussion and links it with content so that students must work together in an interdisciplinary group to "treat" the patient. Students and faculty interact through online modules and instant messaging. Faculty have roles much like actors in a murder mystery. Students must guide the patient's care, coordinating the physicians' activities, requesting consulting physician visits and determining the course of action. This use of instructional technology increased the urgency of learning with real-time case progression, much like real-life patient situations, increased each student's accountability to the team, and establishing relationships between students, faculty. and specialists. This study revealed that using the technology is conducive to equal contribution among participants and led to a patient-centered, interdisciplinary learning environment integrating case discussion with content. The researchers found that integrating this technology early in medical school lays a foundation for interdisciplinary professional collaboration.

 

Reflection: As a health science teacher with a love of technology, I am always looking for ways I can use technology to teach my students. Unlike students of my generation, current high school students have been playing with cell phones, laptops, and Gameboys since they were toddlers. I'm thinking that well-placed technology lessons will engage my students, thereby making teaching, and my life, easier. This article interested me because I have a lot of students who are considering becoming physicians, and I wanted to see how medical schools are using technology. I like the idea of using real-time case progression, because cases don't solve themselves in an hour a la "House M.D." In a medical school environment, this sort of training would work. It would be hard to implement in a high school, but the online case bank would be a good resource for teaching teenagers, even if they come in for an hour a day to see what's changed with their patient since the day before. (That's actually way more time than most patients in the hospital SEE a doctor.) I was really hoping the article would have information about case-simulating manikins - yes, that's the medical spelling of the word - but that's all right, because this article was from 2006 and also, because I found a lot of good articles on medical education and technology on this journal's website.