The Aquifer Educator Connection Podcast brings you insights and practical tips about how expert health professions educators are using Aquifer’s virtual patient cases and resources to enrich learning. Join Dr. Lynne Robins as she talks to expert educators about how they incorporate Aquifer’s award winning e-Learning platform into their curricula to maximize student learning, provide tips and insights into getting the most out of the resources available to educators and students, and learn about best practices in using Aquifer.

Episodes

COMSEP and Aquifer: Collaborating for Excellence in Clinical Education

Guests:

Melissa Held, M.D., Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases and Associate Dean of Student Affairs at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and Curriculum Lead, Aquifer Pediatrics.

Kirstin Nackers, M.D., Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Director of Pediatric Undergraduate Medical Education at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Senior Director and Editor-in-chief of Aquifer’s Pediatrics Board.

This episode discusses the longstanding and synergistic relationship between Aquifer and COMSEP. Educators from both groups have worked continuously to integrate their resources and ensure Aquifer Pediatrics comprehensively covers the COMSEP curriculum as it evolves. We’ll share details of COMSEP’s recent curriculum mapping project as an example of COMSEP and Aquifer’s processes to create trustworthy curricula and teaching resources.

Implementing Coaching in Clinical Settings

Guest: Sherilyn Smith, MD, Professor Emerita of Pediatrics, University of Washington School of Medicine and International Coaching Federation Certified Coach

Description:​ In this episode, Sherilyn Smith returns to our podcast to discuss how to implement coaching in clinical settings. We revisit our discussion about the value of coaching to develop master adaptive learners and then spend time focusing on the specifics of preparing for and conducting coaching conversations with learners, with advice on how to use Aquifer Calibrate, our new formative assessment system.

Full show notes and additional resources, including Aquifer’s coaching and feedback template, can be found here.

Debriefing Aquifer Cases: Templates for Dynamic Discussions

Guest: Kelsey Dougherty, MMSc, PA-C is Assistant Professor, Pediatrics – Child Health Associate/Physician Assistant Program (CHA/PA) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine

Description:​ In this episode, Kelsey Dougherty outlines the benefits of using a debriefing template to achieve program learning objectives by ensuring that all small group faculty highlight key concepts in class discussions. She emphasizes that the template is highly adaptable for use in all health professions educational programs and that it allows for creativity within a standardized approach. You can download the template and follow along as Kelsey and Lynne step through the template and discuss how to approach the use of each component part.

Full show notes and the debriefing template can be found here.

Practicing Trauma-Informed Care with Aquifer

Guests: Sheela Raja, PhD, Director, College of Dentistry Resilience Center and Associate Professor, Oral Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago.

and

Shairi Turner, MD, MPH, Chief Health Officer at Crisis Text Line, New York, NY.

Drs. Raja and Turner, both experts in Trauma Informed Care, collaborated with interprofessional experts across the nation to create Aquifer’s cases on Trauma Informed Care.

Description:​

Description:​ In this episode, Drs. Raja and Turner discuss the prevalence and impact of trauma on both patients and health care practitioners and the importance of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to practice universal trauma precautions in healthcare. They describe how they collaborated to create Aquifer’s Trauma-Informed Care cases and lay out the kinds of trauma to which all practitioners must be attuned. Additionally, they provide strategies and suggestions for adding TIC to health professions courses and curricula.

Full show notes can be found here.

Adopting Aquifer to Teach Orphaned Topics

Guest: Karen Scaglione, DNP, Assistant Teaching Professor, St. Louis University Trudy Busch Valentine School of Nursing; Member, Aquifer Nurse Practitioner Task Force.

Description:​ In this episode Karen Scaglione, DNP highlights the value of using Aquifer to fill curricular gaps without adding faculty time. She describes how she incorporated Aquifer Radiology into her curriculum as self-directed learning to build students’ knowledge and skills in diagnostic imaging and prepare them for licensure and practice.

Full show notes can be found here.

The Future of Formative Assessment

Guest: Leslie Fall, MD, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aquifer and Clinical Professor, Division of Medical Education, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Description:​ Dr. Leslie Fall shares her inspiration and vision for Calibrate, Aquifer’s new formative assessment system. Calibrate aims to shift learner’s focus to developing the fundamental cognitive skills of caring for patients. Calibrate empowers learners with information that shows what they know, what they don’t know, and guidance on what to do next to advance their clinical reasoning skills.

Full show notes can be found here.

Engaging Didactics: Bringing Medical Education to Life

Guest: Omer Awan, MD, MPH, CII, Associate Professor of Radiology and Associate Vice Chair of Education at the University of Maryland School of Medicine; Teaching and Learning Lead for Aquifer Radiology

Description:​ In this episode, Dr. Omer Awan provides encouragement, motivation, and guidance for mastering the skills of preparing and delivering compelling educational presentations to improve student learning retention and transfer. He also offers tips for using Aquifer resources to increase peer-to-peer interaction and learning during instructional sessions.

Full show notes can be found here.

What Students are Saying: Tips to Maximize Learning

Description:​ ​

In this episode, Drs. Bierman and Vasilakis share their insights into the student experience of using Aquifer and provide tips and guidance for faculty to improve engagement and help students maximize the learning with Aquifer cases.

Full show notes are available here.

Coaching Conversations: Tips & Tools to Empower Your Learners

Description:​ ​ In this episode, Dr. Sherilyn Smith provides tips on how to prepare for and conduct coaching conversations that develop students into lifelong learners who are able to create plans, take time to reflect, identify personal learning gaps and are motivated to fill those gaps. She explores ways to empower learners to create goals, develop strategies, incorporate feedback, and build on prior knowledge.

Dr. Smith also discusses how Aquifer’s new Calibrate formative assessment system benefits faculty and students by providing information that can inform and enhance their coaching conversations. Calibrate assessments are designed to leverage the concepts of test-enhanced learning and spaced repetition to drive self-directed learning in clinical students. Granular reports provide visibility for faculty and students into student knowledge gaps and certainty misalignment, enabling meaningful mid-clerkship feedback, informing coaching, and providing structured remediation.

Full show notes can be found here.

Generating Meaningful Discussions about SDOH with Aquifer Cases

Creating opportunities for meaningful discussion around Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) can be challenging for health professions educators. In this episode, Regina Welkie and Emily McSparin describe how they were able to successfully integrate SDOH into a clinical curriculum by incorporating Aquifer cases into a journal club format. The Aquifer cases give students a shared experience and provide a springboard for a broader small group discussion about SDOH concepts they have experienced during clinical rotations. This approach resulted in deep, authentic conversations between students and faculty around the real impacts of SDOH on patient care.

Full show notes can be found here.

Addressing a Critical Gap: Standardizing Primary Palliative Care Education with New Cases

Foundational skills in communication, symptom management, transitions of care, and interprofessional collaborations are critical in improving the quality of life of patients with serious illnesses–but most health professions students don’t receive standardized education in these key principles of primary palliative care. In this episode, Dr. April Zehm describes the Aquifer Palliative Care Leadership team’s creation of a national standardized curriculum and soon-to-be available online palliative care course focused on preparing students to provide high-quality patient-centered care. She will also discuss how faculty can integrate course resources into their pre-clinical and clinical teaching.

Full show notes can be found here.

The Transformative Power of Student Voices

Guest: Katherine Chretien, Professor of Medicine, Associate Dean for Medical Student Affairs, Director of Medical Student Wellness, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Aquifer Student Engagement Co-Lead

In this episode, Dr. Chretien shares the joy and benefits she derives from collaborating with medical students. She describes the pivotal role that students played in her work, including shaping the content of her recently published book on how to navigate and thrive in medical school. We also explore her work as an Aquifer Student Engagement Co-lead, where she mentored students on a race and culture project with a lasting impact on medical education and infuses student feedback into developing projects to better meet students’ learning needs. This podcast offers listeners a model for authentically engaging with medical students to enliven and enrich medical education.

Full show notes can be found here.

Preparing Learners for Clinical Practice with WISE-OnCall

Guest: Jeff Manko, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, NYU/Bellevue Medical Center, Director of GME Professional Development, Director WISE Programs, Medical Director of GME/CME at NYSIM

In this episode, Dr. Jeff Manko discusses how NYU pairs WISE-OnCall modules with their own simulation to onboard new residents and why this is a useful model for medical and health professions programs. He also explains how WISE-OnCall modules, whose development was informed by the AAMC’s EPAs, can be used to help learners diagnose and manage clinical situations they are likely to encounter on clinical clerkships, advanced sub-internships, and during the transition to residency or practice.

Full show notes can be found here.

Integrating Telemedicine Into Medical Education

Guest: Amit Pahwa, MD, Director, Internal Medicine Sub-Internship, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Associate Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Editor-in-Chief, Aquifer Foundations of Telemedicine

In this episode, Dr. Amit Pahwa discusses the development of Aquifer’s new Foundations of Telemedicine course, which is freely available to all teachers and students. Dr. Pahwa talks about the genesis of the courses, how to integrate the courses into your curriculum, how the cases fit different needs of students, and how faculty members can use the cases in their instruction. Due to the rise in the use of telemedicine across all disciplines, these courses are of great importance to all medical professions students. The cases align with the AAMC’s Competencies for Telemedicine.

Full show notes can be found here.

Integrated Illness Scripts – Linking Basic Science Concepts to Patient Care

Guest: Leah Sheridan, PhD Professor of Physiology, Ohio Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and Sciences Lead, Aquifer Sciences Course Board

Engaging medical students in mastering essential basic science concepts can be challenging if they don’t understand how or why they are relevant to caring for patients. Aquifer’s Integrated Illness Scripts provide learners the “why” by explicitly connecting clinical features with the science mechanism, laying the groundwork for providing excellent patient care. In this episode, Dr. Leah Sheridan shares why she is such an enthusiastic proponent of teaching with integrated illness scripts and describes how you can incorporate them into teaching pre-clinical and clinical learners.

Full show notes can be found here.

Using Aquifer Cases in Women’s Health and Behavioral Medicine

Guest: Mary Stahovich, MHP, PA-C Assistant Professor and Didactic Coordinator of Physician Assistant Studies at California Baptist University

While Aquifer doesn’t have dedicated courses on Behavioral Medicine or Women’s Health, many of the cases already available in your subscription are excellent resources for these courses.  In this episode, Mary Stahovich, PA-C describes how the richness of Aquifer cases helps her enhance her didactic courses on women’s health and behavioral medicine – areas in which it can be particularly challenging for students to obtain experience prior to entering clinical practice.

Full show notes can be found here.

Targeting Learning Support for Remediation and Flexible Pathways

Guest: Jaime Bowman MD, Clinical Education Director of Family Medicine, Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine.

As medical schools actively recruit more students from underrepresented populations (women, minorities, first generation learners, and students with a military background), the expectations for a “straight line” trajectory through MD programs will need to change.  Educators need help meeting all students where they are and supporting them on their path to graduation. Dr. Jaime Bowman is a first-generation learner herself.   She makes a compelling plea for flexible pathways and shares her approach for using Aquifer to provide individualized support for students needing remediation due to ongoing gaps or because they are returning from a family or personal leave.

Full show notes can be found here.

Harnessing Group Learning to Develop Clinical Reasoning Skills

Guest: Dolapo Babalola MD, Associate Professor of Family Medicine, Director, Family Medicine and Rural Health Clerkship, and Director, Family Medicine Undergraduate Medical Education at Morehouse School of Medicine.

In this episode, Dr. Dolapo Babalola shares her tips about how to run interactive group sessions that promote engagement with Aquifer cases and enhance students’ clinical reasoning skills. Before creating her model of facilitated case-based sessions, which incorporates role play and group learning, Dr. Babalola got complaints from students that Aquifer cases were just busy work. Now students in her family medicine clerkship report finding value in learning how to solve clinical problems collaboratively with peers.  Clerkship directors have also commented on the high level of skill that students who have completed the family medicine clerkship bring to subsequent clinical experiences.

Full show notes can be found here.

Assessing Clinical Decision Making with Aquifer’s Internal Medicine Exam

Guest: Valerie Lang, Associate Professor of Medicine, Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and Academic Director of Assessment of Clinical Decision Making, Aquifer.

Dr. Valerie Lang was instrumental in the development and validation of the Aquifer Internal Medicine Clinical Decision Making Exam, which assesses learners’ clinical reasoning and decision making and is free to subscribers of Aquifer’s Internal Medicine course. In this podcast, Dr. Lang explains why the exam was developed and the benefits of integrating it into an overall assessment program to achieve a more comprehensive picture of students’ clinical competence.

Full show notes can be found here.

Aquifer Cases as Standardized Patients

Supporting Residents as Teachers and Learners with Aquifer Cases

Guest: Michael Dell, MD, Professor of Pediatrics and Vice Chair for Education at Case Western Reserve University SOM and a pediatrician at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. Aquifer Pediatrics – Senior Director & Case Author.

Dr. Dell is an enthusiastic proponent of using virtual cases across the continuum of medical education, including with advanced learners like residents and interns. In this episode, Dr. Dell describes how he incorporates cases into his Residents as Teachers Curriculum, replacing lectures with noon conferences.  In their flipped classroom model, residents run the conference like rounds leading a discussion about an Aquifer case framed as the ‘virtual patient you admitted the night before’ and incorporating rich what- if and compare and contrast scenarios.  Dr. Dell also shares a successful collaboration with residents to create a case-based orientation curriculum for acting interns that eased their transition to the hospital setting. The curriculum included instruction about essential content as well as practical tips on how to get things done in the hospital.

Full show notes can be found here.

Easing the Transition from Pre-Clinical to Clinical Learning

Guest: Traci Marquis-Eydman, Associate Professor & Director of the Maine Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship | Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University

​In this episode Dr. Traci Marquis-Eydman describes the benefits of using a hybrid approach to orienting students as they begin their clinical learning phase. The transition to clinical learning is always challenging, as students must not only shift to applying knowledge in busy clinical settings, but they must also develop as professionals, thinking and acting as vital and responsible healthcare team members. When COVID learning disruptions exacerbated the challenges of this transition by limiting student and faculty ability to interact face-to-face, Traci developed a hybrid orientation that incorporated online delivery of essential content using Aquifer cases and optimization of in-person time for team building and learning sessions requiring face-to-face interaction and participation. On completion of the course students rated the course positively, felt more prepared for the wards and clinical reasoning, and got to know faculty and staff more than in previous years.

Full show notes can be found here.

Facilitated Discussions and Role Playing Using Standardized Cases

Guest: Kirstin Nackers, MD, Assistant Professor and Director of Pediatric Undergraduate Medical Education at University of Wisconsin-Madison

In this episode, Dr. Kirstin Nackers shares two examples of case-based instruction she uses to increase student engagement and promote learning in an integrated core clerkship combining Pediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynecology and Geriatrics. She describes the first example as a “COVID-induced improvement”, recalling that when COVID restrictions prevented students from learning about diagnosis and treatment of patients with fever in actual clinical contexts, she turned to Aquifer’s fever case to teach this core content. The lesson she learned was that using a single case enabled her to improve teaching sessions by developing a standardized discussion guide that faculty facilitators could use to focus interactive discussion and better ensure achievement of session learning objectives. The second way she uses cases is to develop role plays for a session designed to teach students about abuse, neglect, and mandated reporting. The goal of the session is not only to increase students’ knowledge about mandated reporting requirements – but to increase students’ comfort talking about those tough topics with patients. She has found that an engaging way to master communication skills is through practice with role play followed by structured debriefing.

Full show notes can be found here.

Teaching and Assessing SOAP Note Skills with Pre-Clinical Students

Guest: Ronda Mourad, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Cleveland, OH.

Teaching and evaluating pre-clinical students’ SOAP notes with some consistency across different clinical settings and preceptors can be challenging. In this episode Ronda Mourad, MD describes how she uses Aquifer cases to standardize the processes of both teaching and assessing this critical skill.  Through using the cases Ronda is pleased to find that not only is the playing field and feedback for students more level, but it’s more robust as well, and she can widen her pool of assessors to include junior faculty and advanced students.

Full show notes can be found here.

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