A  College of Medicine team presented one poster on the use of technology to improve patient safety. Dr. Bethany Ballinger, an Orlando emergency physician and assistant professor of emergency medicine and clinical informatics, Nadine Dexter, director of the Harriet F. Ginsburg Health Sciences Library, and Dr. Mariana Dangiolo, professor of family medicine, highlighted the college’s use of iPod touches. The hand-held devices contain Epocrates, a drug database of over 3,300 drugs. The poster explained how medical students use their iPods to identify potentially dangerous drug interactions for patients they see during their training with local doctors. In addition, College of Medicine students use Geriatrics at Your Fingertips software on mobile devices as they work with senior patients.

Another AAMC poster, co-authored by Dr. Ballinger, showed how the College of Medicine became the first American medical school to initiate the World Health Organization’s (WHO) patient safety curriculum. The WHO identifies 11 areas that are key to improving patient safety, including infection control, surgery, medication and practical ways to analyze how mistakes are made.

Patient safety is one of the College of Medicine’s Longitudinal Curricular Themes (LCTs), interdisciplinary topics interwoven into the four-year curriculum. And the college’s message at the AAMC was that topics like patient safety must be emphasized at every turn.

“Safety is such an important thread in the curriculum,” said Dr. Ballinger said, who is director of the patient safety LCT. “You can’t just have a course on patient safety for three days and then be done with it. Patient safety must be a part of everything you do.”

The hand-held computers contain Epocrates, a drug database with over 3,300 prescription, generic and over-the-counter medications, DynaMed, a database of 3,000 disease summaries that includes symptoms, prognosis and treatments, and Stedman’s Medical Dictionary.

“Keep your iPod touches in your white coat pockets,” was the message students received from Dr. Bethany Ballinger, a Florida Hospital emergency room physician who teaches informatics at the College of Medicine. “With them you have information instantly at the point of care.”

During their classroom training with Dr. Ballinger, students used the hand-held computers to determine whether a patient traveling to Brazil needed a preventative treatment for malaria, the names of prescription drugs used to treat gastro esophageal reflux disease (GERD) and the definitions of words such as “diaphoretic,” and “ecchymosis” that described a car accident patient in the emergency room.

In clinical and hospital settings, medical students may not have immediate access to computers or cell phones with Internet access. With the iPods, they can review symptoms and examination protocols before they see a patient and can also check on possible drug interactions for patients who are taking a variety of medications. The devices are especially useful as students work with their perceptions, who are local physicians, as part of their medical school training.

Video of College of Medicine students receiving iPod touch training from Bethany Ballinger, M.D.:  

The Â鶹ԭ´´ College of Medicine will begin implementing the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Patient Safety Curriculum this fall, and the WHO believes we are the “the first medical school to do this in the USA.”

Patient safety has become a national topic since a 1999 Institute of Medicine report estimated that medical errors kill as many as 98,000 people per year. Follow-up surveys of medical schools found that young doctors in training did not feel they received enough in-depth education in patient safety.

In response to this issue, the WHO developed a patient safety curriculum to be taught in medical schools. The WHO identifies 11 areas that are key to improving patient safety, including infection control, surgery, medication and practical ways to analyze how mistakes are made. The goal of the curriculum is to improve patient safety and communication and to create a medical care culture that encourages learning from mistakes rather than issuing blame.

The WHO has invited the Â鶹ԭ´´ College of Medicine to become a pilot site for evaluation of the patient safety curriculum along with 10 medical schools in countries across the world, including India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Argentina, Nepal and Canada. Dr. Bethany Ballinger, an Orlando emergency physician and clinical assistant professor in emergency medicine and clinical informatics at the College of Medicine, brought the curriculum to our medical school and now serves as the college’s director of the patient safety longitudinal curricular theme.

Dr. Ballinger said that because medical school training has so many subjects to cover, students usually don’t get exposed to patient safety issues until they are working in hospitals and clinics. “Our medical students come into contact with patients beginning in the first year, and it follows that exposure to the key concepts of patient safety should be integral to their education from the start,” she said. To do that, Dr. Ballinger has introduced patient safety into College of Medicine courses.

“The emphasis is on understanding the journey the patient makes through the healthcare system and recognizing how the system can fail and what we can do to prevent this,” she said. “Patient safety is emerging as a discipline in its own right and we are honored to be playing a part in paving the way for the future.”

Source: Wendy Spirduso Sarubbi, Â鶹ԭ´´ College of Medicine Information/Publication Services, 407-823-0233 or wsarubbi@mail.ucf.edu