RISE honors 11 teams with COVID-19 Education Innovation Awards

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the University of Michigan community with numerous opportunities to explore its effects on our education, research and patient care mission.

RISE received 31 COVID-19 education innovation proposals from faculty, staff and learners across Michigan Medicine, the School of Public Health, the College of Pharmacy, and the Center for Inter-Professional Education.

Proposed ideas addressed education gaps created by the pandemic with novel education interventions, adjustments to teaching modalities, and new content for delivery within science, health or health care delivery.

“The disruption wrought by the pandemic to our educational mission is unprecedented. As evidenced by the number and quality of proposals submitted to RISE by our faculty, staff and students, the creativity, dedication, and commitment to providing an outstanding education for our learners across the educational spectrum is exceptional,” said James O. Woolliscroft, M.D., the Lyle C. Roll Professor of Medicine, and professor of internal medicine and learning health sciences, who led this initiative within RISE.

Principal innovators and winning projects are:

• David Belmonte  (Department of Psychiatry) — Enabling virtual visits in the clinical setting
• Thomas Bishop  (Department of Family Medicine) — Creating an interprofessional virtual e-learning patient case for medicine, nursing, and pharmacy learners
• Benjamin Cloyd (Department of Anesthesiology) — Developing an online universal precautions module to protect clinicians from aerosolized infections during intubation
• Phoebe Danziger (Department of Pediatrics) — Generating an interactive website to address ethical dilemmas
• Taylor Jamerson (Medical Student Association) — Executing programming to support local communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19
• Emily Nairn (UMH Audiology) — Designing a provider toolkit to improve provider communications with patients with hearing loss
• Laura Power (Department of Epidemiology School of Public Health) — Executing an interprofessional experiential challenge for population health crises
• Elizabeth Putnam (Department of Anesthesiology) — Crafting a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure to facilitate interactions and decision-making between learners and faculty in the virtual clinical environment
• Rishindra Reddy (Department of Surgery) — Using wearable technology to facilitate virtual rounds in the surgical learning space
• Taylor Standiford (Medical Student Association) — Archiving medical education leaders’ perspectives and experiences on leadership in times of crisis
• Raza Zaidi (Department of Anesthesiology) — Creating an immersive extended reality curriculum for Anesthesia education

All submitted proposals were reviewed by a panel of education innovators and leaders.

Each proposal received feedback regarding degree of change and feasibility of the proposed idea, potential for scalability of implementation, and the extent to which it presented an issue facing health sciences education at Michigan Medicine brought about by COVID-19.

In addition, those who made submissions were invited to collaborate with members of the RISE community to further develop, elevate and implement their innovation idea.