2010 GRANT HIGHLIGHTS

Lehigh Valley Health Network – Division of Education

Resident Education
Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) is an accredited member of the Nation's Council of Teaching Hospitals of the Association of American Medical Colleges and has a long history of providing high-quality education programs to developing healthcare professionals. Graduate medical education has been a valued tradition for more than a half-century at LVHN. LVHN trains over 200 residents in 18 ACGME, AOA, and ADA accredited residency, specialty and fellowship programs with over 400 physician faculty.

LVHN has resident programs in dental medicine, emergency medicine, family medicine, general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, osteopathic internship and transition year. LVHN has special and fellowship programs in cardiology, colon and rectal surgery, hematology and oncology, surgical critical care, plastic surgery, and pulmonary critical care.



Bridging the Gaps
Lehigh Valley Health Network's Bridging the Gaps Health Internship Program matches health professions students from local colleges with community sites in Allentown. Interdisciplinary pairs of students contribute to the health of our community by providing free community health service. At the same time, students learn about current issues in community health and gain invaluable experience working in interdisciplinary teams.



Faculty Development
The Division of Education sponsors and delivers network-wide interprofessional workshops for all clinical educators including physicians, nurses, and physician assistants. A workshop series, called The Teaching Leader, has been designed to assess and build LVHN's capacity and capabilities for teaching and outcomes-based education. Workshops are attended by over 400 faculty members annually in such topics as learning theory, narrative medicine, ethics and professionalism, simulation, systems, feedback, assessment and teaching at the bedside.


Youth Programs
Youth Education Programs have served over 2,500 students. The targeted audience is primarily high-school and undergraduate students. Each youth program shares the common goal of increasing the exposure of young people to potential careers in health care. LVHN offers a Research Scholars Program for undergraduates in a variety of clinical and non-clinical settings. The Emerging Health Professionals program is a dual enrollment program combining college-level science courses, honors health curricula, and observations in a health-care setting. The Health Care Career Discovery program offers middle- and high-school students, college students, parents and community members the opportunity to engage in classroom learning and observation in a health care setting.



Virtual Worlds
The Division of Education at Lehigh Valley Health Network continues to explore innovations that will extend the opportunities for professional development and building of clinical skills. Through the use of three-dimensional computer-generated simulated environments in which physicians, nurses and students use avatar representations to interact, highly engaging clinical scenarios can be explored. Virtual worlds offer a limitless and cost-efficient means of creating what could otherwise be expensive and difficult to do in a classroom or clinical setting. The virtual world also allows clinicians to change roles, not only to understand each other's roles, but gain a deeper understanding of the patient experience.



Simulation
The Lehigh Valley Health Network Interdisciplinary Simulation Center (ISC) strives to improve quality of care and patient safety through innovative educational techniques. The Simulation Center provides an environment for individuals and teams of all specialties and disciplines in teamwork, communication, and clinical skills in a safe simulated clinical environment. Through the use of high-fidelity human mannequin simulators and recreation of various clinical settings, physicians, nurses, residents and students engage in intensive training scenarios further building their clinical expertise.

Lehigh Valley Health Network – Department of Community Health and Health Studies

School-based Dental Sealant Study
Dental sealants are an evidenced-based, preventive approach to reducing the most common childhood disease in the United States, tooth decay. Disparities in oral health care remain evident among children from families with low incomes and children from racial and ethnic minority groups. Poor oral health has a direct effect on general health and quality of life, including a child's ability to learn. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), with assistance from LVHN's Division of Community Health and Health Studies, is examining the relationship between oral health, student academic performance and attendance.

During the 2008-2009 school year, the Dental Sealant Study found that only 18 percent and 22 percent of second-grade students in the Allentown and Easton Area School Districts (respectively) had one or more dental sealants, compared with the national objective of 50 percent. During the first two years of the Dental Sealant Study, 2,122 second grade students participated in the program and 1,562 received dental sealants. More than 800 children were referred for further care with the assistance of school district dental hygienists and nurses. The quality of care measured by sealant retention rates exceeded expectations, a significant positive outcome credited to the program's highly experienced and compassionate clinical staff. Additionally, a 40-minute oral health education program was provided to all second-grade students in both school districts.

We look forward to another two years of improving the oral health and positively impacting the lives of thousands of students.




Pediatric Asthma Program
Lehigh Valley Health Network's Division of Community Health and Health Studies and Department of Pediatrics were awarded a grant that supports Phase I of a multilevel intervention designed to improve the control of pediatric asthma among children aged 5-11 years living in center city Allentown. The intervention includes clinical and community components that are tightly woven together and built upon the four pillars of a patient-centered medical home. The four pillars that establish a primary care practice as a patient-centered medical home are "personal, access, comprehensive, coordinated". The pediatric asthma program will develop and test strategies that enable a children's medical clinic to provide care that is personal, accessible, comprehensive, and well-coordinated with specialty care and community services. These strategies will involve the establishment of a team comprised of clinic providers, an asthma navigator based in the clinic, and a community health worker based in the community. Phase 1 of the program is comprised of infrastructure development, training, patient/parent educational material refinement and testing, baseline data collection, and program implementation.

Lehigh Valley Health Network – Department of Family Medicine and Telehealth Services

Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice (P4)
In 2010, Pool Trust made its final two-year commitment to the Lehigh Valley Health Network's five-year Primary Care Residency Education Initiative called Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice (P4). P4 is a national residency education initiative involving 14 residency programs across the United States, including LVHN's Department of Family Medicine. Grounded in the assumption that family medicine residencies are a key bridge in the development of physicians and must be environments in which residents can learn to adapt to inevitable changes in life and medicine, P4's purpose is to inspire and examine substantial innovation in the content, structure and location of training of family physicians and guide future revision in accreditation and certification requirements.

P4 innovations focus on teaching residents the core competencies of family medicine through a curriculum that blends traditional learning with active patient care. Residents and faculty work collaboratively in community practice settings and facilitate the professional development of graduates deeply grounded in family medicine with strong core knowledge and skills in population health, chronic disease management, office procedures and behavioral and integrative medicine. Residents become leaders with skills in collaboration, information management, critical thinking, life-long learning and self care.

This latest phase of P4 is focused on full implementation and evaluation of the effectiveness of the residency innovations.

With more than $2 million of Pool Trust funding since 2007 and several unique and successful training and curriculum changes, LVHN's program is considered to be one of the premiere P4 sites in the United States.

Pilot Telehealthcare Program
Telehealth services are "the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health and health administration" (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for the Advancement of Telehealth).

Dr. Karen S. Angello, former Superintendent of the Allentown School District (ASD) provided the first live test of the pilot telehealthcare program on June 22, 2010. This pilot telehealth program will be serving schoolchildren attending Cleveland, McKinley and Central elementary schools.

The program was made possible through the support of The Dorothy Rider Pool Health Care Trust, which awarded $175,000 to Lehigh Valley Health Network's (LVHN) Department of Pediatrics in the development of a telehealthcare pilot program in the Allentown School District (ASD). This partnership will immediately increase access to care, decrease "lost" time from work for parents and guardians related to taking children to a health care provider, and improve the management of chronic disease issues in a school-aged population. Joseph A. Tracy, Vice President for Telehealth Services at Lehigh Valley Health Network, commented, "We are excited about the opportunity to provide this service in the Allentown schools. This may be the first school-based telehealth network in the Commonwealth."

Dr. Jarret R. Patton, MD, Medical Director of the Children's Clinic at LVHN, expressed enthusiasm for the program: "I am thrilled that we will have the opportunity to serve more children in the Allentown School District. This should benefit some children within the district that had no immediate access to health care providers within their school."