Students Adding Value: Improving Patient Care Measures While Learning Valuable Population Health Skills

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Primary Care
• Quality Improvement

Background:

• Ambulatory primary care practices can benefit from medical student involvement.
• Aligning student learning objectives with clinical practice needs is crucial for successful integration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate a quality improvement (QI) curriculum during ambulatory clinical rotations.
• To assess the impact of aligning medical student learning goals with practice needs on clinical outcomes.

Main Methods:

• A QI curriculum was implemented in ambulatory clinical rotations involving 128 students across various practice settings (academic, university-affiliated, community health, private).
• Student project measures were correlated with monthly practice dashboard outcome measures.
• Binomial mixed effects models were employed to analyze QI measures.

Main Results:

• University-affiliated practices with student involvement showed an approximate doubling in the odds of breast cancer screening in March 2017 compared to 2016.
• This improvement in screening odds was 36.2% greater than in comparable practices without student involvement.

Conclusions:

• Aligning medical student curricula and assignments with the needs of ambulatory practices leads to measurable improvements in clinical metrics.
• Medical students can effectively contribute to real-world healthcare improvements when their educational goals are integrated with practice requirements.