Dell Medical School has developed a new interactive curriculum dedicated to teaching medical professionals how to improve health care from the inside out, and it’s catching on throughout the country and world.

Dell Med, a leader in value-based health care, designed an innovative program to help teach the concept to future doctors, practicing physicians and anyone else who is interested. This approach to health focuses on identifying and measuring outcomes that matter to patients — while also considering health care costs — with a goal of providing better care at lower costs.

This Dell Med program was made possible by the Episcopal Health Foundation (EHF), which in January 2016 awarded the school a $1 million grant to develop a value-based health care curriculum. As part of the grant, the school set out to develop a set of interactive, adaptive learning modules on the subject. The online modules,

“Discovering Value-Based Health Care,” are designed for use primarily by medical students, residents and practicing physicians, although anyone can take them. Continuing medical education credit is available for doctors who complete the first three modules, bundled as “Introduction to Value-Based Health Care.”

“EHF has really made it possible to create this resource for the world,” said Chris Moriates, M.D., Dell Med assistant dean for health care value and a practicing hospital medicine physician.

The investment is one of EHF’s largest single grants to date and represents its continuing support of innovation and long-lasting improvements to systems of health across Texas.

“If all the health system offers is more medical procedures, then it doesn’t address all the other factors that determine health,” said Elena Marks, EHF’s president and CEO. “This focus on improving health, not just health care, has the potential to dramatically improve community health across Texas and beyond.”

Developing the modules was a complex process that required input from Dell Med faculty knowledgeable in value-based health care, adult-learning experts, a video-production company and instructional technology designers.

“Medical education leaders and policymakers have identified ‘high-value, cost-conscious care’ as a critical deficiency in health professional training, yet medical schools and residency training programs face many barriers to developing these new materials, such as intense time pressures, crowded curricula and lack of faculty expertise,” Moriates said. “By investing the resources required (time, multidisciplinary expertise and financial requirements), we at Dell Med are able to address these challenges on a national scale by introducing on-demand educational tools that can be accessed independently and incorporated across different educational settings.”

The first three modules — each taking about 45 minutes to complete — went live in June 2017. By summer 2018, all 10 modules will be available.

In just a few months, the new curriculum has attracted more than 3,500 users from 42 states and seven foreign countries. Dell Med got the word out about the modules through media coverage, presentations at conferences and social media. While the implementation of the program started with Dell Medical School students, who began taking the modules when they were rolled out, other institutions such as NYU, Johns Hopkins and Creighton are also requiring medical students and residents to complete the curriculum.

“This tool has the promise of creating a generation of clinicians who are well-versed in value-based health care and motivated to deliver it for their patients,” Moriates said.

Modules include video vignettes with patient stories, quizzes, interactive charts, case studies in value-based care and commentary from Dell Med leaders. One module includes an exercise that mimics filling an online shopping cart — learners read a clinical scenario and watch charges accumulate with each additional medical service they choose. The result: learners see how charges add up and how much patients will need to pay based on different possible insurance plans.

The modules, which are free to all learners, will remain that way so that value-based health care education can be accessible to all. The program, however, will be sustained by charging a fee to the institutions that require student usage data to fulfill requirements. This will begin in 2018.

The modules, taken by Dell Med residents in addition to medical students, are just part of what the school is doing to promote value-based health care. The concept has been incorporated throughout the curriculum. For example, during medical students’ year of clinical rotations, they are encouraged to integrate concepts of value into their daily oral patient presentations. On medicine and surgery rotations, they write a value-based health care report reflecting on a patient care issue they saw or experienced during their rotation.

“Since value is integral to everything we do as health care clinicians, it is important to not have value be just a course but rather woven into all components of medical training,” Moriates said.

Published May 2018