Subtitle: Bridging the gap: connecting students to clinical informatics through a quality improvement project using Electronic Health Record data.
Despite the proliferation of advanced technologies in healthcare, a significant gap remains in both awareness and learning opportunities to integrate clinical informatics for physical therapist (PT) students. To energize the next wave of students to be data-informed and data-driven clinicians with appropriate informatics skillset, an elective course was piloted using a hybrid learning approach that involved a unique set of technologies offered at UCSF. From concepts to practicum, the students had seven weeks to jumpstart a quality improvement (QI) project by comparing evidence-based clinical practice guidelines to actual retrospective clinical practice patterns in a UCSF faculty practice.
In this session, the speaker will share four main takeaways from the pilot elective course: 1) Identifying use cases and how different set of technologies (i.e. Slack, Tableau, RapidMiner, Clarity, Apex training environment) were integrated to make the QI project achievable within a reasonably short period; 2) Unanticipated findings from the QI project which helped students and faculty to have a critical discussion points over patient outcomes and clinical care; 3) Lessons learned and limitations from instructor and students’ perspective; and 4) Future directions to incorporate clinical informatics into the curriculum for students and clinical faculty to engage in the learning health system at UCSF.
Slides: https://ucsf.box.com/s/dh3lnnditikqv8y6774ji33hn8niuafw (MyAccess login required)
The audience should be familiar with a basic understanding of clinical and patient-reported outcomes, structured and unstructured data, and basic functionalities of electronic health record systems, namely Apex. Participants should have some interests in quality improvement opportunities using informatics framework despite potentially having limited resources from their department.
Dr. Sam Pak is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy (PT) and Rehabilitation Science. As a licensed physical therapist with healthcare IT experience, his expertise is in health informatics and regulatory quality reporting. Over the last ten years, Dr. Pak has served as both instructor and innovator to a wide range of healthcare audience and teams combining his clinical expertise and health informatics with regulatory quality programs such as Meaningful Use/Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). With both healthcare IT expertise and clinical experience in physical therapy, Dr. Pak offers a unique blend of the two essential skillsets to the UCSF PT Program and Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students.
Dr. Pak’s academic training includes a BA in Business Administration from the University of Washington (1999), a DPT degree from UCSF/SFSU (2007), and post-graduate training Certificate in Biomedical Informatics from Oregon Health Science University (2017). Dr. Pak holds several levels of technical certifications in Epic Systems (electronic health record system) and is trained in Clarity for previous data integration and quality reporting analysis.