At NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, a model of interprofessional education called NYU3T: Teaching, Technology, Teamwork aimed to enhance undergraduate medical and nursing students’ competency in team-based care.

This four-year project fostered collaboration among physicians and nurses to boost communication and care coordination for interprofessional healthcare teams. The project also has tested a curriculum for virtual interdisciplinary training of healthcare professionals and validated new technologies for health professions education.

Overseen by principal investigators Marc M. Triola, MD, at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Maja Djukic, PhD, RN, at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, NYU3T was supported with funding from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.

The NYU3T curriculum didn’t replace traditional clinical experiences in either medicine or nursing. Rather, it afforded students several advantages, such as the following:

• continuity of learning across their years of education, including simulated disease progression
• unique opportunities for interdisciplinary team building, including role-playing, working collaboratively in interdisciplinary notes, and formulating problem and care plan lists
• integration of basic science and clinical medicine
• contextually sensitive learning links into other comprehensive computer-based resources at NYU, as well as to the medical literature

A Model of Virtual, Interdisciplinary Learning

The NYU3T curriculum, which focused on patient safety and quality improvement, consisted of online learning modules, virtual patients, mannequin-based simulation, and clinical crossover to prepare medical and nursing students for interprofessional practice.

Web-Based Learning Modules

The didactic part of the NYU3T curriculum was provided in a series of one-hour web-based modules that included texts, images, videos, virtual teammates, and interactive exercises. The modules addressed interprofessional topics, such as healthcare team members’ roles and responsibilities, teams and teamwork, effective communication and conflict resolution, interdisciplinary care planning, and informatics.

Virtual Patients

A two-hour complementary virtual experience allowed medical and nursing students to collaborate in virtual teams and see screen-based virtual patients along with simulated collaborative patient encounters.

Pairs of medical and nursing students were assigned two virtual patients who had congestive heart failure and experienced a fall. They had to “manage” these patients for two weeks.

Mannequin-Based Interprofessional Simulation

This voluntary 90-minute session of on-campus clinical simulation, held during the spring semester, allowed medical and nursing students to apply communication and teamwork skills to encounters with robotic “patients” and faculty preceptors.

Clinical Crossover

As part of regularly scheduled clinical sessions, students could participate in a clinical crossover. A nursing student could shadow medical students, or a medical student could shadow nursing students.