Virtual Interprofessional Education: An Innovative Approach

Interprofessional (IP) education and practice have been advocated for in healthcare to reduce medical errors and improve patient care and outcomes (IOM, 2003). Recommendations include IP teamwork beginning during training so that longer-term habits and capacities for collaboration form pre-graduation. This is challenging given the current constraints of clinical education, which is bound by space, location, off-campus clinical rotations and conflicting academic schedules. New approaches need to be developed, tested, refined and implemented if academic settings are to provide high quality, high impact IP education.

An innovative Virtual Interprofessional Learning (VIP) platform uses state-of-the-art technology to engage learners in a variety of IP clinical learning opportunities across disciplines, universities, and geographies.  The VIP platform is a virtual health care setting utilizing Avatars (virtual actors with characteristics of a real person in an online environment).  The Interprofessional Education Collaborative Core Competencies (IPEC, 2011) guided development of the VIP platform with a focus on patient care quality and safety and IP communication competencies.   In addition, students complete the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) root cause analysis and communication modules to build baseline knowledge before entering the virtual IP environment.  Then, via the VIP platform and Avatars, the students interactively conduct a root cause analysis through a complex case in a virtual world scenario.      

During the implementation phase, each health profession program collaborates and identifies what level of student and semester would most benefit from the learning opportunity.  Students and faculty complete an online orientation to the VIP platform.  Students then complete the online, asynchronous IP virtual experience over six weeks.

For the evaluation, students’ IP collaborative knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviors will be assessed via focus groups, questionnaires and automatic scoring through the VIP platform.  Unique to the evaluation plan is the ability of the VIP platform to assess a number of IPEC competencies through automated scoring, populating at the end of the virtual student experience. 

This innovative approach will help advance IP education.  The VIP platform is portable, exportable and generalizable and will promote incorporation of IP education in a wide variety of clinical scenarios and locations.