Abstract:

Providing medical students a broad base of patient-care experiences is essential for facilitating their development toward attaining the core competencies expected of physicians. The time patients spend on the hospital wards represents only a small window on the patient’s long-term illness. Inpatient care usually occurs during the acute phase of the disease, and it typically does not include the patient's initial presentation of the illness nor allows students to understand the recovery process. With this in mind, DukeNUS Medical School developed the Medical Student Outreach & Patient Education (M-SCOPE) program. This program merges patient interviews, self-tracking, motivational interviewing and technology to provide a student view to better understand what happens to patients between clinic visits - while they are in their homes and community setting.

This paper will focus on the technology section of the project which includes an outpatient smartphone app, a medical student smartphone app, and a web portal. The outpatient smartphone app is an easy to use app where the outpatient can answer a series of questions daily, which are mapped to their primary condition be it diabetes, hypertension, etc. The app also tracks and gamifies their feedback by providing badges and levels depending on the number of logs per week. Additionally, the app allows the outpatient to send messages directly to the medical student thus providing an easy way for open communication between the two parties. The outpatient would have consented to participate in an education project and will be completely aware that the medical student is not their health provider. The communication between the outpatient and the medical student will focus on motivational interviewing which is supported by technology.

The medical student has access to two applications a smartphone app and a web portal. The smartphone up provides a clear summary of their assigned outpatients’ key data, the last data logged in by each outpatient in their charge and the ability for them to text with individual patients. The web portal provides a more robust application where the medical student can log a case journal, create events with alerts and print out reports of outpatient data. Lastly, the web portal allows administrators, faculty and instructors to add medical student participants as well as outpatient participants to the program. The web portal provides a view of all entered data so that student and outpatient communications can be moderated. Validations have been put in place as reminders to both medical students’ and outpatients’ to log data or review information in the portal. These validations will allow the supervisors to track engagement and user’s activity. We believe that using technology to keep connected with patients in the community and to better understand chronic illness is possible. This technology solution is very feasible and can be scaled and used for a limitless number of medical students.

Keywords:

Medical education, technology, self-tracking, outpatient, smartphone app, outpatient.