Most health professionals haven’t played with play-doh, popsicle sticks, and pipe cleaners since preschool, but these were the tools they used to create prototypes for interprofessional education (IPE) programs during the recent Reimagining Health Science training: Design-Thinking Workshop.
Workshop — hosted by the new Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) Office of Interprofessional Education and Cooperative Practice (IPECP); The Hatchery, Center for Innovation; and Emory University School of Medicine — was the afternoon component of Emory’s first Medical Education Day since 2019. The Oct. 24 event brought together faculty, staff, students and physicians from Emory’s three health professional schools and Emory Healthcare to participate in 12 interprofessional teams.
“Our goal was to bring together faculty and students across our schools to dream up what IPE should and will be at Emory, and we were thrilled with the interest and engagement at this workshop, which was the office’s kickoff event ours.” says Jodie Guest, co-director of IPECP’s WHSC Office and vice chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health.
Guest opened the workshop by introducing the IPECP Office and challenging participants to be visionary when conceiving IPE ideas for Emory. Shannon Clute, director of The Hatchery, and Ben Garrett, The Hatchery’s manager of programming and innovation operations, followed her presentation by providing an overview of the design thinking or human-centered design approach.
“We find that human-centered design is widely applicable and especially useful in situations where you’re not starting from a place of complete clarity on the nature of the problem at hand or the needs of your target audience,” explains Clute. “By putting people at the center of the process and defining problems from their perspective, there is a greater likelihood of developing point solutions.”
Building relationships
The real fun began when the teams designed their IPE program prototypes using preschool equipment. Teams had one hour to define, brainstorm and build their IPE prototypes. The teams then showcased their designs, asked each other questions about their ideas and voted for four award categories – Most Rational, Sign Up, Most Viral and Long Shot.
A common theme emerged during the presentation phase: fostering meaningful ways to bring health professional students, residents, faculty, and physicians together to train and develop relationships with one another.
Team ideas focus on several priority ways of learning together: share a collective physical space to train and build an interprofessional community; actively engage in the community with interprofessional teams; creating new case-based curricula for interprofessional student teams to work collaboratively in simulation labs; and support an easily accessible list of courses that are open to any student enrolled in Emory’s three health professional schools.
Workshop participants and organizers left excited about the future of IPE at Emory.
“The afternoon design thinking workshop was an interesting and useful way to bring stakeholders from Woodruff Health Sciences together to brainstorm how we can create IPE programs that will teach our students how to work with skills in interprofessional teams if they are working in the community, in the classroom. or clinical settings,” says Maha Lund, chair of the planning committee for Medical Education Day and associate professor and program director of the Emory Physician Assistant Program.
Linda Lewin, professor of pediatrics at Emory School of Medicine and director of the Woodruff Academy of Health Educators, agrees. “The workshop provided a great opportunity to learn more about the design thinking approach and how we can apply it to health professions education,” says Lewin. “It was both fun and energizing to work in an interprofessional health team to conceptualize and prototype a program that I think would be beneficial to students throughout the health sciences center. I look forward to seeing how the IPECP Office use the ideas generated by the 12 teams—there is so much potential for growing IPE at Emory,”
Garrett notes, “The Hatchery team was so impressed with the commitment and innovative thinking displayed during the workshop. There are innovative thinkers through WHSC and it is always a pleasure to bring them together for collaborative work.”
“That was exactly what we hoped this workshop would do,” says Guest. “We were able to see clear themes created by our students and faculty together. When 12 independent teams come together around three priority themes—common space on campus, active engagement as teams to support community health needs, and classroom time together—we know where there is excitement for the future of IPE at Emory. Our office and advisory committee will now explore the proposed ideas and determine which ones we can develop and implement in both the short and long term. It is an exciting time to be thinking about IPECP at Emory.”
