WVU team recognized with IPEC Honorable Mention Award
A team from the West Virginia University School of Medicine, in collaboration with colleagues from the WVU School of Pharmacy and WVU Health Sciences, were recently recognized for their research in teaching teamwork-based medicine to care for patients who return home after a hospital stay.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Jenna Sizemore, M.D.; Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine Jessica Thayer, M.D.; Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at WVU School of Pharmacy and the Director of Interprofessional Education for the WVU HSC Gina Baugh, PharmD; IPE Project Manager and STEPS Research Coordinator Kathryn Smalley, CHSE; and Simulation Education Specialist for WV STEPS at the SOM Adam Hoffman, NRP, MCCP, CHSE, started the InterDisciplinary Education Apartment Simulation (IDEAS) Project in 2017.
The goal was to teach students and residents from the pharmacy, nursing, physician’s assistant, physical therapy and occupational therapy programs how to collaborate to improve care for recently discharged patients through standardized patient actors in staged home and apartment scenarios.
In 2021, the program expanded to real-life practice with students and physician preceptors utilizing telemedicine follow-up visits to improve outcomes for recently discharged patients through the Transitions of Care Clinic.
After assessing a patient's needs, they would make a plan of how to get them services, like physical therapy, or how to get medical instruments they might need for home use, like a blood pressure cuff or pulse oximeter.
“These are common things folks can get from a pharmacy or Amazon, but they're quite expensive, especially if you have multiple needs and there's varying insurance coverages on them. So, it was actually a way for us to give these patients a little bit more control of their health so they could monitor for future problems,” Sizemore said.
Sizemore said the use of telemedicine was a big help to those in need when many clinics were closed, especially those in rural areas of West Virginia.
They also found that in addition to teaching students collaborative care, patients generally didn’t return to the hospital for readmission or emergency care, kept follow-up appointments with their primary care doctor, refilled their medications more frequently, reduced high numbers of A1c and blood pressure, all the while spending less money on care.
In July, the team received an Honorable Mention award for their excellence in interprofessional education and collaboration practice from the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) and the Commissioned Officers Foundation for the Advancement of Public Health (COF) at the eighth annual ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Sizemore said she can’t commend her team enough. She described Gina Baugh as the “head coach,” and commended her for her ability to understand the best ways to provide healthcare – in teams. She also commended her ability to coordinate with the main stakeholders.
“We also work closely with a lot of excellent educators from their respective Health Science Center schools. We would love to expand the project in the future. We have such a strong interprofessional education group at WVU and the Health Science Center, not just the School of Medicine, and I felt honored to receive this award,” Sizemore said.
For more information, visit https://medicine.wvu.edu/medicine/.