The Wisdom of the Crowd: Finding the Most Promising Innovations to Teach Value

By Vineet Arora, MD MAPP, Chris Moriates, MD, Andy Levy, MD, and Neel Shah MD MPP

Earlier this year, we launched the Teaching Value and Choosing Wisely Competition in conjunction with Costs of Care and the ABIM Foundation.  Why a competition?   Not surprisingly, traditional “literature review” yielded little by way of promising strategies for educators who wished to learn how to teach about value.  However, we had all learned of isolated stories of success, occasionally through attending professional meetings, sometimes via networking with colleagues, or more often through just plain word of mouth.  To help bring these stories of success to the fore, we relied on a crowdsourcing model by launching a competition to engage a larger community of individuals to tell us their story.  Of course, there were moments we wondered if we would get any submissions.  Fortunately, we did not have anything to worry about!  In June, we received 74 submissions, from 14 specialties with innovations and bright ideas that targeted both medical students, residents, faculty and inter-professional learners.

Reviewing each abstract to determine the most promising practices that could be easily scaled up to other institutions was not an easy task.  One interesting struggle was the inherent trade-off between feasibility and novelty – what was feasible may not have been so novel, while you were left wondering whether the most innovative abstracts would be feasible to implement.  Fortunately, due to the outstanding expert panel of judges, we were able to narrow the field.  While all the submissions were interesting and worthy in their own right, it was clear that there were some that rose to the top.  For example, while every submission included some level of training, the most promising innovations and bright ideas employed methods beyond traditional training- such as a systems fix using electronic health records, a cultural change through valuing restraint, or oversight or feedback mechanisms to ensure trainees get the information they need to assess their practice at the point-of-care.

Perhaps it is not surprising that several of our winners came from innovations or bright ideas developed by trainees or medical students.  After all, the junior learners are on the sharp end of patient care and in the position to see the simplest and most elegant solutions to promote teaching value. Giffin Daughtridge, a  second year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania proposed linking third year medical students to actual patients to not only review their history, but also their actual medical bill.  As emergency medicine residents at NYU, Michelle Lin and Larissa Laskowski were inspired by Hurricane Sandy to develop an easy to use curricular program for her peers.  While at Yale, Robert Fogerty instigated a friendly competition among medical students, interns, residents and attending physicians to reach the correct diagnosis with the fewest resources possible during morning report style conferences.

The methods employed to achieve success were equally diverse, ranging from repurposing traditional tools to using new methods altogether.  Building on the traditional clinical vignette, Tanner Caverly and Brandon Combs launched the “Do No Harm Project” at the University of Colorado to collect vignettes about value to learn from. This program also informed the launch of “Teachable Moments” section in JAMA Internal Medicine that is now accepting submissions from trainees.  Meanwhile, Amit Pahwa, Lenny Feldman, and Dan Brotman from Johns Hopkins University proposed individualized dashboards that would make lab and imaging use for each trainee available for feedback and benchmarking against their peers.   And Steven Brown and Cheryl O’Malley at Banner Health proposed a local high-value competition that resulted in more than 40 entries from trainees. Drs. Brown and O’Malley plan to implement the most promising ones.

These are just a few of the innovations and bright ideas that were submitted. You can check out the entire list of innovations and bright ideas on the Teaching Value forum.  Our hope is that this is just the start of developing a network of individuals interested in working together to transform medical education by incorporating principles of stewardship.  So, in this case, we recommend that you follow this crowd.

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Vineet Arora, MD MAPP  on behalf of the Teaching Value Team members including Chris Moriates, MD, Andy Levy, MD, and Neel Shah MD MPP