'Openly' Disrupting Healthcare Education

Life-cycle of a medical education creation from Jump Simulation. 

At the Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center, we design based on a real need. We test. We revise.We refine. We lock down the version that meets our needs. We leverage our collaboration with other academic institutions. We share it and our know how when it comes to the design and build of training devices and sometimes we submit to such good testing practices that it warrants a peer-reviewed publication. Most of the time we document the design, build, use, and document the feedback so well that it becomes scale-able and accessible to others-- even to an international community.

Jump Sim has been building and sharing collaboratively for a long time.

An excellent example is the Drexel University Simulation collaboration. Jump Sim employed engineering intern talent to built the simple and low cost surgical airway trainer we called Winston. This young team was charged with creating a device that not only replicated the surgical airway procedure, but was able to mimic various levels of difficulty to meet a specific training need; that is- better realism and greater difficulty to be able to differentiate the well-trained from the novice. This procedure is the classic for medical simulation, low frequency and high stakes and is best done through  medical simulation because clinicians don’t carry out these procedures regularly. There is a well-described performance standard, and there is a definite need to meet that standard for the diverse trainees who come through the doors at Jump Sim.

When Jump commits interns from our world class engineering internship or from Jump’s full time engineering staff the projects are data driven and evidenced-based.

Design teams from Jump Sim are composed of medical students, engineers, and industrial designers. They are led by knowledgeable subject matter experts. They follow good design principles, equipped with state of art prototyping equipment, and have access to a diverse faculty for mentorship. The Jump intern program is highly selective and competitive and attracts the best and brightest from across the nation's schools.

When faced with the surgical airway challenge the team quickly built and tested a novel surgical airway trainer. They converted anatomical imagery to 3D printed anatomy. That 3D print mirrored a patient from chin to sternum. The process and the trainer were showcased at at the annual International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) in 2014. Fortuitously Dr. Sharon Griswold a Drexel faculty who had a similar need for training and others came to that presentation.

That meeting with Dr. Griswold led to an intentional academic collaboration where investigators from Drexel worked with Jump's engineers and the Jump Simulation Fellow to receive our Winston devices. They tested the Winston device with their professional learners and generated a work of scholarship which is now submitted for peer review based on their findings.

The lesson learned for Jump was that open collaboration truly expanded our impact.

We wanted to maintain that high quality and evidence-based analytical approach, but to simultaneously build a community of potential collaborators who are interested in expanding the armamentarium of clinical educational technologies. Our concept now is a creative commons open-access website which allows for a community of designers, educators, and scholars to share and discuss these small-scale creations. We license under an open source creative commons license and don't simply share our own tested creations. We will also test and post the findings of other creators and designers in the field of clinical simulation.

The expanding accessibility (nearly ubiquitous) of 3D printing has made it possible to share these creations and disrupt traditional boundaries. Even those educators in austere environments now can download and print devices accompanied by use instructions and curriculum to carry out training at that high performance standard.

For us, it is about sharing the gifts we have received in gratitude. Our gratitude begins with a desire to serve patients and improve their safety through advanced training. The outcome is world-class collaboration and the improvement of patient care outcomes well beyond our traditional borders.