Faculty Perceptions of Readiness to Implement Interprofessional Education in Athletic Training

PURPOSE As the athletic training profession advances, master’s degree accreditation standards aim to position athletic trainers as key players on interprofessional healthcare teams. Interprofessional education standards were recently introduced to academic leaders as key elements in the professional healthcare education of athletic trainers. While the current standards reflect essential skills for entry-level clinicians, faculty instructing these elements may require additional development. METHODS The objective of this study was to explore athletic training educators’ perceptions of interprofessional education and to examine perceived barriers related to the implementation of IPE in athletic training curricula. An electronic survey was administered to a stratified, random sample of 1000 athletic training education program faculty from the National Athletic Trainer’s Association (NATA) member database. Participating faculty completed the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale (IEPS) and a set of additional Likert-scale questions regarding barriers to implementation of IPE in athletic training education. RESULTS The results indicated that differences exist in faculty readiness to implement IPE based on faculty rank or role, years of teaching experience, prior experience and skill level using IPE, and geographical location of the athletic training program within the institution. CONCLUSION The results indicated that differences exist in faculty readiness to implement IPE based on faculty rank or role, years of teaching experience, prior experience and skill level using IPE, and geographical location of the athletic training program within the institution. Together, the findings suggest that IPE integration should include initiatives that provide administrative support, delineate leadership roles, offer formal IP development, and aim to create closer physical proximity among healthcare disciplines on campuses

Determining anion-quadrupole interactions among protein, DNA, and ligand molecules

Background An extensive search through the Protein Databank (about 4500 nonredundant structures) was previously completed within our lab to analyze the energetic and geometric characteristics of an understudied molecular interaction known as an anion-quadrupole (AQ) interaction. Such an interaction occurs when the positively charged edge of an aromatic ring, resulting from a quadruple moment (i.e., a dual dipole moment), renders the aromatic molecule noncovalently bound to a nearby anionic molecule. The study considered a very limited scenario of molecules that can participate in AQ interactions, consisting of the phenyl group of a phenylalanine (phe) amino acid as the aromatic participant and the carboxylate group of an aspartate (asp) or glutamate (glu) amino acid as the anionic participant. The results revealed anion-quadrupole pairs to be prevalent within most of the protein structures. It was also observed that the interaction energy for AQ pairs was heavily dependent on the angle between the anion and plane of the aromatic ring, favoring a more planar interaction. In light of these critical observations being made from such a limited scenario, only phe-glu and phe-asp pairs and in a reduced sample set of the PDB, we are now continuing this work of identifying AQ interactions using a greatly expanded strategy. We are following these four aims: 1. Optimizing the AQ-search program to run in a semi-parallel fashion and on a large cluster of processors in order to handle larger analyses, 2. Adding to our search additional anionic participants which will include non-protein structures such as DNA and small ligands, 3. Studying a subset of the AQ pairs with molecular dynamics simulations in buried and solvent exposed environments to observe non-static behavioral traits as well as the reproducibility of AQ interactions by force field parameters. 4. Building an online database for public access to our data and search program. Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the NSF-IGERT traineeship, Scalable Computing and Leading Edge Innovative Technologies (SCALE-IT), for providing the resources for this project

Making sense of health information technology implementation: A qualitative study protocol

BACKGROUND: Implementing new practices, such as health information technology (HIT), is often difficult due to the disruption of the highly coordinated, interdependent processes (e.g., information exchange, communication, relationships) of providing care in hospitals. Thus, HIT implementation may occur slowly as staff members observe and make sense of unexpected disruptions in care. As a critical organizational function, sensemaking, defined as the social process of searching for answers and meaning which drive action, leads to unified understanding, learning, and effective problem solving -- strategies that studies have linked to successful change. Project teamwork is a change strategy increasingly used by hospitals that facilitates sensemaking by providing a formal mechanism for team members to share ideas, construct the meaning of events, and take next actions. METHODS: In this longitudinal case study, we aim to examine project teams' sensemaking and action as the team prepares to implement new information technology in a tiertiary care hospital. Based on management and healthcare literature on HIT implementation and project teamwork, we chose sensemaking as an alternative to traditional models for understanding organizational change and teamwork. Our methods choices are derived from this conceptual framework. Data on project team interactions will be prospectively collected through direct observation and organizational document review. Through qualitative methods, we will identify sensemaking patterns and explore variation in sensemaking across teams. Participant demographics will be used to explore variation in sensemaking patterns. DISCUSSION: Outcomes of this research will be new knowledge about sensemaking patterns of project teams, such as: the antecedents and consequences of the ongoing, evolutionary, social process of implementing HIT; the internal and external factors that influence the project team, including team composition, team member interaction, and interaction between the project team and the larger organization; the ways in which internal and external factors influence project team processes; and the ways in which project team processes facilitate team task accomplishment. These findings will lead to new methods of implementing HIT in hospitals

Building better interdisciplinary scientists: creating graduate level courses to address the communication gap in interdisciplinary research

Background The SCALE-IT (Scalable Computing and Leading Edge Innovative Technologies) program at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville is one of an increasing number of programs at institutions across the country that relies on the success of interdisciplinary research. To prepare students for interdisciplinary problem solving, universities typically offer advanced courses or seminars in interdisciplinary topics. While courses like this are ideal for advanced students who have extensive backgrounds in both computational science and domain sciences, most graduate students lack core competency in fields outside of their own disciplines and are thus unprepared to step up to high-level multidisciplinary courses. However, traditional institutional curricula do not provide opportunities for graduate students to develop an appropriate ground-level understanding in disciplines outside of their primary department. To address this issue, the SCALE-IT program has initiated the creation of introductory graduate level courses to overcome the lexical barrier between academic fields. Over the past two years, the SCALE-IT program has developed four successful graduate level courses dedicated to teaching introductory topics in bioinformatics at the University of Tennessee. Results One course in particular, A Survey of Biology for Computational Researchers, demonstrates the success of this SCALE-IT initiative. This course aims to introduce a survey of biology to graduate students in other computational fields by addressing the crippling language barrier and building a community around six computational topics. The six topics explored are: Genomics, Biochemistry and Protein Biophysics, Cell Biology and Cell Signaling, Immunology, Phylogenetics and Evolution, and Populations Ecology. During the course of the semester, each topic concludes with a guest lecture and open discussion from an expert at the University of Tennessee in the computational domain. Graduate students from across five different academic disciplines are registered in this course for its first semester of instruction. Conclusions In response to the high level of interest and success in these courses at the University of Tennessee, SCALE-IT is working towards establishing this curriculum as a permanent foundation in graduate interdisciplinary education. The permanent inclusion of graduate level basic courses would greatly enhance the versatility of the interdisciplinary student. In turn, the development of more capable graduate students will directly enable university-level academic fields to make greater strides in advancing the scope of successful interdisciplinary research