Unintended Consequences of a Transition to Synchronous, Virtual Simulations for Interprofessional Learners

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Medical Simulation
• Telemedicine

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid shift from in-person to virtual healthcare education.
• The effectiveness of fully synchronous, virtual interprofessional education (IPE) remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness of in-person versus virtual interprofessional education (IPE) case simulations.
• To analyze two distinct IPE cases: medical error and charity care, delivered in both formats.

Main Methods:

• A comparative analysis of pre-pandemic in-person and pandemic-era virtual IPE simulations.
• Utilized The Interprofessional Collaborative Competency Attainment Survey (ICCAS) for participant assessment.
• Calculated effect sizes (Cohen's d) for pre- and post-simulation surveys.

Main Results:

• Virtual medical error simulations demonstrated a large effect size (0.81).
• Virtual charity care simulations showed a smaller effect size (0.64).
• Large numbers of health science students participated in both in-person and virtual settings.

Conclusions:

• Synchronous virtual IPE can be effective, particularly for complex scenarios like medical errors.
• The structure and details of patient cases significantly influence the impact of virtual IPE.
• Further research is needed to optimize virtual training for detecting subtle patient cues in telemedicine.