Boulder, CO. — April 5, 2018 — This week, Partners Healthcare and Amplifire co-presented research findings from a study about healthcare providers’ understanding of traumatic brain injury (TBI) diagnosis and management. The study data were collected by Amplifire’s software, which Partners uses to train interdisciplinary healthcare providers in TBI diagnosis and management practices, as well as several other topics. The findings were presented at the Sixth Annual MGH Public and Community Psychiatry Symposium, and at the 2018 Harvard Psychiatry Research Day Poster Session and Mysell Lecture.
The presenters were JR Donehey, YV Adamova, MJ Hays, RJ Birnbaum, and RD Zafonte. Matthew J. Hays, PhD, is Senior Director of Research and Analytics at Amplifire. Robert J. Birnbaum, MD, PhD, is the Vice President of Continuing Professional Development at Partners Healthcare. Dr. Birnbaum is responsible for developing system-wide policies and standards in instructional design, content dissemination, and training initiative implementation. He is also responsible for validating outcome metrics and leveraging those data to maximize the impact of signature education and training initiatives.
As background: During Amplifire training, initial questions capture what each learner knows about each concept before any instruction is provided. Amplifire also captures confidently held misinformation —when learners believe they are correct but are actually wrong. After training is complete, Amplifire’s reporting platform can portray these data in a “heatmap,” from which important patterns quickly emerge. These heatmaps have recently been enhanced to allow users to aggregate data by learner attributes (e.g., role, supervisor, tenure), content attributes (e.g., topic, difficulty), or both.
The present study demonstrated that this new heatmap aggregation functionality can provide revealing comparative analyses and insights. The researchers specifically compared nurses to rehabilitation therapists in their awareness and application of TBI treatment concepts. In some areas (e.g., radiologic interpretation), these two groups of learners were roughly equivalent. In others (e.g., pharmacologic treatment), nurses had substantially more confidently held misinformation. Partners Healthcare plans to use these findings to adjust their caregivers’ scopes of practice to fit their indicated areas of expertise.
Based on these insights, Partners is expanding their use of the Amplifire system to include courses on preventing and managing C. difficile infections, safe use and management of opioids, management of diabetes, and more of the dozens of courses we offer.
If your organization would like to join Partners Healthcare, Intermountain Healthcare, Providence Health and Services, and many other national health systems in using Amplifire to prevent patient harm by finding and fixing healthcare providers’ confidently held misinformation, contact us here.