Bridging Innovations: Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Interprofessional Medicare Wellness Clinic

On Jan 1, 2011, Medicare expanded its preventive services coverage to include an annual wellness visit (AWV) to encourage providers to focus on preventive screening and wellness of patients.  Shortly afterwards, The Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel released a report in May to help guide curriculum development to incorporate interprofessional education.  The goal is to prepare students in all health professions to “deliberatively” work together with the common goal of building a safer and better patient-centered and community/population oriented U.S. health care system.  To capitalize on the opportunity to incorporate interprofessional education into the newly recommended AWV, a healthcare team comprised of faculty members from the fields of audiology, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, psychology, and speech-language pathology designed and implemented an Interprofessional Medicare Wellness Clinic (IMWC) to conduct these wellness visits as a clinical and educational initiative.  The goal was to use a team approach to provide personalized prevention plan services and patient-centered visits as well as to incorporate interprofessional education and experience by bringing together students and faculty from these different fields.  Since August, 2011, 15 clinics have been held and more than 70 students have participated. Preliminary results obtained on the students’ perspectives of their experience using pre- and post-clinic surveys shows that the IMWC has had a positive impact both from a clinical and educational standpoint.  The experience also illuminates the inherent challenges of interprofessional education.  The presentation will include recommendations for planning, implementing and evaluating the IMWC.  Strategies for successful implementation and problems encountered will be addressed in the presentation.