January 2013: Innovations in Innovation Outcomes?

Educator perceptions of the relationship between education innovations and improved health.Friedman SR, Loh LC, Burdick WP. Medical Teacher. 2012, October; Early Online: e1-e8. Available online.

Innovation in health care education is in high demand. Institutions have innovations grants and innovations awards. Through formal and informal channels, we promote, cultivate, fund, and sustain innovative efforts. Indeed, medical education journals are riddled with descriptions of educational innovations¹, including innovations designed to cultivate innovation.^2,3 As editor of Academic Medicine, Steven Kanter even wrote an editorial helping us critically analyze our innovations for publication.⁴ His editorial, and the prevalence of innovative projects in the literature, shed light on the role and value of dissemination of educational innovations toward the improvement of practice.

This month, though, we use this article by Friedman and her colleagues up north to revisit the outcomes of our educational innovations and examine how they might extend beyond practice to public health.

After surveying faculty in Brazil and India, the authors generated a framework to understand how faculty believed their educational innovations contributed to health improvement. Mainly, the authors found that faculty believed the structure and process of their educational innovations improved the quality, quantity or relevance of health care education, which they then believed led to improved outcomes in public health.

Methodology in this article is not incredibly rigorous – a survey is distributed to an admittedly “relatively small and non-representative sample of faculty from two countries.”^{(p. e7)} However, the authors do explore that critical link between health care education and health. Beyond that, they suggest that we, as innovators in education, explore that critical link as well. They argue that the links between educational innovations and public health improvement “impact what types of education innovations are implemented, or even conceived.”^{(p. e7)} In other words, are we confident that we promote, cultivate, fund, and sustain educational innovations that are designed to improve public health? This article does not provide the answer, but it does encourage us to develop the question.

Bottom Line:

Innovations are critical to continued improvement in clinical education. Read this article, and those referenced below, to own your role as an innovator. The framework presented in this article suggests that your local innovation could have a broad impact. 

References

1. Anderson MB. A peer reviewed collection of reports on innovative approaches to medical education. Medical Education. 2012; 46(11): 1099-1100. Available here.

2. Armstrong EG, Barsion SJ. Creating “Innovator’s DNA” in Health Care Education. Academic Medicine. 2013; 88(3): 1-6. Available here.

3. Andolsek KM, Murphy G, Nagler A, Moore PR, Schlueter J, Weinerth JL, Cuffe MS, Dzau VJ. Fostering creativity: How the Duke graduate medical education quasi-endowment encourages innovation in GME. Academic Medicine. 2013; 88(2): 1-7. Available here.

4. Kanter SL. Toward Better Descriptions of Innovations, Academic Medicine. 2008; 83(8): 703-704. Available through the Health Sciences Library.