May 4, 2012 8:00 AM – 9:30am
Manon Maitland Schladen EdS, MedStar Health Research Institute
National Rehabilitation Hospital
Deeonna Farr, MPH, National Rehabilitation Hospital
Brenda Tsai, BS, National Rehabilitation Hospital
Alyssa Pederson, BS, National Rehabilitation Hospital
Alexander Dromerick, MD, National Rehabilitation Hospital
M. Christopher Gibbons, MD MPH, Johns Hopkins University
Chelsea Kidwell, MD, Georgetown University Medical Center
Recent literature suggests that virtual patients constitute the training intervention of choice for developing reasoning and decision-making skills in the health care arena. Medical students, however, have predominated among learners studied to date. The needs and learning contexts of other players in the health care continuum have been largely unexplored. We describe the development and formative evaluation of an educational module using virtual patient technology (DecisionSim) in the training of lay health workers (patient navigators). The design objective of the module was to help patient navigators participating in community health research understand how the fact that research was being conducted affected the ethical standards they needed to observe in interacting with their patients. Module content focused on five, evidence-based areas of ethical conflict: recruitment, informed consent, patient privacy, therapeutic misconception, and data integrity. As key informant interviews with patient navigators revealed animation to be a preferred medium for engagement, transmission of information was, in significant part, scenario-based. Animations were created using an inexpensive, user-friendly platform (Xtranormal) and linked via public social media (YouTube). We describe both an explicit (through DecisionSim navigation and dwell statistics) and an implicit (through YouTube attention statistics) method of evaluating knowledge and impact of materials on the learning process.
