How might we design an innovative medical education model that motivates learners and improves their skills at airway management?
Client
Weill-Cornell Medicine | NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
Skills
UX Research, Field Studies (Contextual Inquiry), Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Qualitative Research, Co-Design Workshop, Design Probes, Survey, Prototyping, Testing.
Context
An education in the field of medicine is a challenging experience. Learners, residents, and health care practitioners work for long, difficult hours while performing life-saving procedures. Students require hundreds of hours of training to master critical skills and gain experience in their area of expertise. But traditionally, hospitals were not spatially optimized for teaching and education. There were typically no dedicated rooms for hands-on training. The pandemic has further highlighted the limitations of healthcare education and accelerated the need for a hybrid solution that provides knowledge and training at multiple levels of interaction.
Critical Airway Management is one of the many crucial technical skills that medical students have to master to save patient lives. This course is hosted by the Protected Airway Collaborative (PAC), which is a creative education project designed to teach critical airway management skills to medical learners. It is a series of theme-based learning experiences that are designed using a team of airways experts. This project lives under Weill-Cornell Medical School in collaboration with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Background
The PAC coursework includes a series of self-directed training modules that enhance a user’s knowledge through visual and audio aids. The skills learned in this coursework are primarily used in the ER where users often work more than 60+ hours per week. Often, users review these training modules while on break from their regular shifts. Training modules include digital content, simulatory challenges, interactive stations, and faculty coaching. This coursework takes a fresh approach by creating an immersive and interactive educational experience.
The founder and lead doctor of PAC, initially designed 6 major learning themes for this course. These included the pediatric airway, situationally difficult airway, anatomically difficult airway, physiologically difficult airway, oxygenating the patient, and learning how to be comfortable in an airway operator room. Currently, there are over 150+ visual posters that support these 6 key themes.
While the students appreciated the new model of education, they often did not know how to navigate the course. The posters and video content existed in online spaces and in resident rooms, but engagement was low. Moreover, the posters had duplicates due to the volume of content that was designed in a short time. They needed a thoughtful user flow that guided the learning journey of medical students. The challenge was to create a content strategy for the learning modules and organize the content using an effective design system.
“PAC is probably the most innovative teaching experience I’ve been to at least in the medical education world. Some of the content I found a little distracting, that maybe had a little bit too much going on on them, but most of them are really helpful.”
— Resident & PAC Learner
Problem
How might we design an innovative medical education model that motivates learners and improves their skills at airway management?
Process
Stakeholder Mapping
The team began by conducting secondary research into airway management, medical education, and the existing U.S. Healthcare system to identify and position PAC and its associated stakeholders that interact with this community.
User Interviews
The team investigated the current scenario using 5 in-depth user interviews with medical learners and educators. The goal was to understand the user experience of the PAC coursework. The discussion guide included questions about the challenges in learning, the interactive educational model, its effectiveness, and how the PAC community continues to evolve over time.
Qualitative data coding was used to identify emerging themes such as, the relevance of learning micro-skills, having a multi-sensory approach to learning, leading with a hybrid approach, and the importance of feeling confident in mastering a very difficult skill.
“Traditional medical learning is based on didactic learning. The PAC is different because it uses a multi-sensory approach that allows the learner to use different sides of their brain.”
— PAC Educator
Design Probe
The team designed a visual probe to better understand how learners understood the modules currently. The probe was tested with medical residents in the field. It asked the users to rank the hierarchy of information that they saw as elements of the poster (color, typography, images, headlines, etc.). Further, it asked them to identify the emotions that the posters evoked and ultimately asked them to rank the helpfulness of the posters on a Likert scale.
This helped quantify and segment the content that worked well and which content did not fare well with the learners. Overall, there was a range of emotions experienced by learners after looking at the posters.
Workshop and Content Audit
Next, the team facilitated a workshop with the founder and the lead doctor of PAC to understand the original intent of the posters and the learning content. Affinity mapping and thematic clustering helped identify 150 posters, organize themes into content buckets, and map the content sequentially in a user flow for the learners. We observed that the content was divided into 6 key learning modules by the founding educator. Within those, we mapped 5 content types in each module: The Big Picture, Core Concept, Personal Insight, Tools & Techniques, and Guided Practice. These were identified and labeled by the team to help develop the posters that would help the learners.
Iteration and Prototype
Once the qualitative and quantitative research were analyzed, the team began redesigning the posters while focusing on the new content strategy and information architecture. We designed 6 master posters as prototypes. The other 144 posters followed the wireframes of the masters. The standardization of the posters allowed for flexible designs, ease of production and proved to be a cost-effective method.
Test
The posters were tested at the Live PAC Event at the Weill Cornell Medicine Center at the NewYork Presbyterian Hospital. Users interacted with the posters sequentially and had a chance to offer feedback and thoughts through a small survey.
Result
PAC continues to implement the posters in their virtual and physical spaces. The visual content lives on the website where more audio and visual aids are being created.
Increased engagement & application
Initially, learners were interested but overwhelmed by the amount of content that was available for their training. The information architecture re-design gave them a clear pathway for their learning. It offered them start and end points, helped them mark milestones, and also allowed them to easily jump back into a module if they needed to refresh on a specific topic. A visual audit of the posters was done to remove any duplicate content and organize the modules in a sequential manner. This removed clutter and allowed learners to self-direct their learning pathway and strengthen their knowledge on various topics.
In these new poster designs, the team introduced a navigation bar at the bottom which helped the user position themselves in their learning journey. It gave them a chronological order of following the learning content. A QR code directed the users to video content that related to the poster. The standardization of the posters allowed for flexible designs, ease of production and proved to be a cost-effective method.
Positive growth for content creation
The foundational design system created by the team has made it easier to produce and add new content for PAC. It has helped educators distill knowledge and information into a format that translates visually to learners. Doctors can now reduce the time it takes to make posters from several days to just hours while knowing that the posters fit well into the larger information architecture that is accessible to students.
Establishing a hierarchy of information on the posters helped learners navigate the content effectively. The tracker and call to action at the bottom of each poster helped learners position themselves in their learning journey and directed them to practice and upskill their techniques. This increased engagement and resulted in more positive learning outcomes.
Error prevention
The re-design aimed to aid learners in training to be able to access helpful information quickly, but also for correct use-case scenarios. The content strategy and information architecture (IA) redesign addressed the “Error Prevention” heuristic which works to diminish the amount of errors users make, by placing helpful resources ahead of the action. In this case, students were able to quickly access skills required for saving patient lives.
Impact
In March 2024, PAC will be hosting it’s 10th Annual Live Event that will feature visual posters, simulation challenges, training labs, and faculty coaching to help learners progress in their airway management training.
Reflections
“It is not only about what we learn, but how we learn it that is important. How we learn can help us place knowledge in context, it can help us problem solve, and understand our predicament better when faced with a challenge.”
— Dr. John Browning
Role
Design Researcher
Team
Sophia Geanacopoulos, Kexin Zhang, Yuyao (Wooyo) Jin, Krutika Galgalikar