A clinical immersion program with broad curricular impact for biomedical engineering

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

PROJECT SUMMARY We aim to build a summer immersion program with broad curricular impact for Biomedical Engineering (BME). The immersion program will match undergraduate BME students with third year medical students. These “Clinical Scholars” will act as observers during the medical students' summer clinical clerkships. Importantly, the Clinical Scholars join an established learning community of medical students in “colleges” who progress through their studies as a cohort, and who will serve as their mentors. The Clinical Scholars will gain a personal vantage on the problems encountered daily by clinicians, and will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in multiple clinical fields. A holistic yet targeted admissions process will help ensure the diversity of the Clinical Scholar cohorts. Two sets of written deliverables will be expected of every Clinical Scholar from each clinical clerkship in which they are immersed. The first deliverables are statements of clinical problems or unmet clinical needs, with appropriate user needs and constraints. These Clinical Needs Reports, numbering about ten per year, will be used in new and existing BME design-build courses, broadening the impact of the immersion experience to a much larger number of students. The second of the deliverables are instructional case studies, targeted to BME core or elective courses. These case studies will be used by our degree program faculty for the instruction of the entire BME student body. The case studies will be vetted by program faculty, and will be made publically available after one semester of in-class use and iterative redesign. The medical student mentors will have the option of joining students in the design processes, and both Scholar and mentor will have the option of presenting the case studies in classes where they are used. Every aspect of the program will be subject to longitudinal quantitative assessment, and will add to the knowledgebase of both undergraduate engineering education, and also undergraduate medical education.