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.

Host: Lynne Robins, PhD, Professor Emerita, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA. 

Description:​ In this episode, Drs. Raja and Turner discuss the prevalence and impact of trauma on both patients and healthcare 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.

Host: Lynne Robins, PhD, Professor Emerita, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA. 

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.

Full show notes can be found here.

Host: Lynne Robins, PhD, Professor Emerita, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA.

Description:​ ​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.

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.

Description:​ 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.

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.

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.

Dr. Jaime Bowman shares how she supports students in need of remediation or targeted skills development through an individualized approach. She finds that Aquifer cases provide an ideal low-stakes environment for allowing learners to practice skills, try new things, and build confidence in an accessible and safe space. Dr. Bowman applies her framework to help students who need to catch up, advance their skills, return from family or personal leave, or take an alternative pathway through their education. The breadth of cases available in Aquifer's Content Library provide a rich opportunity for customizing learning plans and assignments to meet learners where they are and addressing specific gaps in knowledge or skills, customizing assignments by clinical location, patient age, condition, or clinical focus.

Full show notes can be found here.

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.

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.

Description:​ ​ In this episode, Dr. Sherilyn Smith shares tips for how to think of Aquifer cases in your curriculum as standardized patients, using them as the basis for active learning sessions, and how this paradigm shift can accelerate the development of clinical reasoning skills with pre-clinical and clinical medical students.

Full show notes can be found here.

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 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.

When the COVID pandemic severely limited student access to clinical teaching sites and preceptors, Cindy Lord developed a teleprecepting program to simulate traditional precepting during a rotation. Aquifer cases formed the basis of learner-centered virtual small group sessions facilitated by a telepreceptor. The sessions provided a means of achieving educational equivalence across teaching sites and instructors, filling curricular gaps, enhancing student learning, and afforded opportunities for the development of mentor/mentee relationships. The teleprecepting program proved so valuable that it is now a regular part of PA education at Case Western Reserve University.

Full show notes and links to supplemental materials can be found here.