The Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine is one of the first three osteopathic colleges that have been selected to join the American Medical Association’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium and receive a $75,000 innovation grant.
The other osteopathic schools selected include the A.T. Still University School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona and the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.
More than 100 medical schools in the United States submitted applications to join the consortium and 21 were accepted.
The three-year grant will be used to develop an initiative that will introduce educational tools focused on enhancing a culture of patient safety and patient-safety research. It will begin during the current academic year with third-year students and will later be expanded to include all osteopathic students and doctors who are continuing postgraduate education in the college’s Statewide Campus System.
According to Saroj Misra, director of clinical clerkship curriculum for the osteopathic college and the grant’s principal investigator, the consortium project is intended to introduce students to concepts of patient safety, to reinforce those concepts as they enter residency and then to offer them with tools to use in developing research projects that can lead to better understanding and improved approaches.
“The idea here was to create a generation of learners who would come to the clinical world with a baseline understanding of the concepts of patient safety,” he said. “We can then reinforce what they’ve learned and they can go on to increase the number of related resident research projects that are completed around the subject and could ultimately change culture as far as patient safety.”
As the grant investigators develop and evaluate the project, they’ll have the opportunity to improve their learnings even further through interaction with medical education leaders at the other consortium schools.
“Being selected to participate in this consortium provides us with an opportunity to exchange and refine novel educational models with other prominent institutions committed to advancing the training of future physicians,” said Donald Sefcik, senior associate dean in the College of Osteopathic Medicine and co-principal investigator. “We look forward to sharing the outcomes of our patient safety learning platforms and research tools with our colleagues and gaining insightful feedback from them.”