For University of California-Irvine’s medical school, the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis have increased and emphasized the use of technology-based teaching innovations that were already underway.
The school’s use of a digitally based curriculum, hand-held ultrasound devices, live streaming, and iPads was all in motion for medical students in Irvine before the virus bore down on a largely unprepared country earlier this year.
“We haven’t really had to do a whole lot of novel or new things only because we were already sort of out there in terms of our technology focus and approach,” Dr. Michael J. Stamos, dean of the UCI School of Medicine, told the Business Journal.
Still, Stamos said the coronavirus pandemic has “definitely made us change how we do things.”
“We want to make sure that, for lack of a better term, the product that we produce at the end of the four years is as good as the product we produced last year and the year before, or even better,” he said.
“We want to be safe, most importantly.”
iPads, Ultrasounds
Incoming students all get an iPad when they start medical school, Stamos said. The iPad lets students access the school’s digitally hosted curriculum, which includes faculty-developed iBooks, clinical and productivity apps and essential digital textbooks as part of an “interactive learning environment,” according to the school’s website.
The school began equipping each medical student with a Butterfly hand-held ultrasound device, starting with last year’s entering class. The move is a major step forward in preparing students to diagnose illnesses.
The training will give students a huge advantage when they graduate from medical school and head into practice, officials believe.
“If you have an ultrasound in your hands on Day One of medical school, four years is a long time,” Stamos said.
The units retail for about $2,000 each for the basic model, according to the company’s website.
Physical Distancing
Classes for the new year at UCI School of Medicine start in just a week, on Aug. 10. Each year, 104 new students start their first year of the four-year program.
As everywhere in the University of California system, UCI is taking special steps to slow the spread of the virus.
“We’ve instituted additional physical distancing measures that don’t detract from the educational experience,” Stamos said in the July 20 interview.
The faculty is a major consideration since the professors and instructors tend to be in a more vulnerable group than the students.
Patient interaction, which starts in the first year, is another major consideration.
“We can’t teach people to be doctors virtually their entire four years,” he said. “We do have a lot of hands-on training, but we also have state-of-the-art simulation.”
That includes mock operating rooms and mock intensive care units, which are more in demand during the pandemic.
Livestreaming
Even the old-fashioned, in-person lecture has given way to tech advancements.
The school’s iMedEd Initiative, which launched in 2010, is transforming the classic lecturer/passive listener model, using online learning as well as audio and video libraries to support active learning and hybrid teaching environments.
“Over the last couple of years we’ve been recording and livestreaming all of our core didactics, all of our core lectures,” Stamos said.
He said just a few years ago some teachers were upset that only a small number of students would turn up for a live lecture. The vast majority were viewing the lectures in their own way, and on their own time.
“It was a little bit of a learning curve for all of us, especially some of the faculty that had been teaching for 20 or 30 years.” Now, he said faculty members increasingly use the school’s media studio to put together “well-produced educational materials.”
Adopting Telemedicine
“We’ve also been introducing concepts around telemedicine and telehealth to our students,” according to the dean.
Stamos added: “We really ramped up telehealth. Luckily we were prepared for that. We absolutely accelerated it and fast-tracked it when COVID became a reality.”
When things eventually return to normal, Stamos said, “We have maintained, as all the UCs have, a significant percentage of telemedicine. It’s good for patients and patients like it even notwithstanding the COVID.”
Future Advances
Amid all the challenges, Stamos loves what he does.
“Seeing how our team has responded to this pandemic and how we’ve been able to weather this storm together just makes me even more energized,” said Stamos, who was named dean three years ago after serving as interim dean.
Looking to the future, Stamos said UCI students will be entering into a world where cellular therapies take on a much more prominent role in areas such as cancer and neuroscience.
Stamos, a surgeon and internationally recognized expert in the treatment of colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, said advances will be “less significant” in the surgical field. Even robotic surgery is “an incremental advance over other surgeries that we already do.”
“The real advances will come in the nonsurgical treatment of the same diseases that we now treat surgically,” he said.
