Virtual Interprofessional (VIP) Learning

The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) will use Macy support to develop advanced interprofessional education (IPE) programs for students who are not on the same campus and not even on a campus. MUSC’s colleges of nursing and medicine plus South Carolina College of Pharmacy would collaborate in developing, piloting, and evaluating an avatar-based platform for interactive IPE exercises, starting with one based on root-cause analysis of an adverse patient outcome.

Although most of MUSC’s medical students are in Charleston and can usually be brought together physically, all of MUSC’s graduate nursing students are distance learners, and the pharmacy school is located in Columbia.  Despite that, these three schools are committed to coordinating schedules so that pilot exercises will occur within the same 6-week time frame. If successful, the platform could be adapted for a variety of multidisciplinary, interprofessional educational uses and address an important problem in involving all health professional students in meaningful IPE.