By Northwell Health’s Office of Academic Affairs announced recently that it has launched its Just in Time Teaching Tools app to aid in the advancement of medical education knowledge and teaching skills of students, trainees and faculty. The app is now available in the Apple Store.
The new app uses the Just-in-time teaching (JiTT) model — a pedagogical approach that involves close interaction between instructors and their classrooms — to better provide timely and relevant teaching tips to trainees and faculty who need to actively engage with their instructors, specifically for those in the patient care setting.
WHAT’S THE IMPACT
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According to the app’s developer, Alice Fornari, EdD, RDN, the associate dean of educational skills development at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and vice president of faculty development at Northwell, the JiTT app creates a more robust teaching and learning environment for everyone in the classroom.
Using technology-enhanced learning platforms is not only feasible, she said, but improves access for learners across the continuum of medical education, and can be especially useful in academic health systems that are geographically dispersed.
“This new app makes that model even stronger,” said Fornari.
In a pilot study — which utilized email to distribute JiTT infographics — trainees and faculty reported overall satisfaction with the content and technology, and a positive perception by trainees’ of their enhanced teaching skills.
Faculty said the JiTT infographics were useful reminders to refresh and guide their teaching skills with trainees and students. It’s also apparent that the JiTT infographic program can be incorporated into busy diverse teaching and clinical settings.
JiTT infographics are adaptable to an array of clinical specialties and include foundational teaching principles in areas such as setting expectations, questioning techniques, feedback and coaching, and bedside teaching. Clinically specific teaching techniques include content pertaining to internal and family medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery psychiatry and neurology. Sub-specialties are also included.
THE LARGER TREND
Northwell, New York’s largest healthcare provider, has been increasing its emphasis on technology as of late. In November, the health system added real-time bed visibility to its 19 facilities through a partnership with TeleTracking Technologies, a care coordination support company.
The extended agreement centralizes Northwell’s operations into one location through TeleTracking’s command center, giving the health system the capability to see all available beds across its network. TeleTracking’s data has the capacity to expedite bed turnover, improve the patient discharge process, automate workflows and enhance communications, according to Northwell.
In October, Northwell said it had developed a predictive tool that can anticipate a spike in COVID-19 cases at its hospitals by mining user data patterns from its Northwell.edu website. With the pandemic still raging worldwide, Northwell plans to give away the source code to other health systems.
The two-week advance warning system was created this summer by the customer insights group, in collaboration with information technology and clinical teams in the wake of the COVID-19 surge that struck the system last spring. Northwell Health treated nearly 85,000 COVID-19 patients, including 16,000 hospitalized patients between March and Labor Day — more than any health system in the U.S., the system said.
