Health Sciences Education Grand Rounds: Dr. Lara Varpio

Contact

Mary Ann Nichols
Vanderbilt University
maryann.nichols@vanderbilt.edu
615-936-8510

When

Tuesday January 13, 2015 from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM CST

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Where

208 Light Hall

Health Sciences Education Grand Rounds
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
208 Light Hall

"Informal Education, Interprofessional Collaboration, and Electronic Health Records: Here Be Dragons"

Lara Varpio, PhD
Associate Professor
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Department of Medicine
Bethesda, MD

Lunch will be provided for all registrants. Please register below.

This presentation addresses the intersection of three bodies of research that can inform clinical education: informal education, interprofessional collaboration, and the use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). In addition to reviewing some of the recent research in each of these three fields, Dr. Varpio reports on findings from her own longitudinal, qualitative research investigating (1) the intersection between informal education and interprofessional collaboration, and (2) how the clinical use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) impacts on the use of narrative in clinical care, and on informal interprofessional education. Findings from her research and from the broader literature are discussed in terms of impact on accreditation, on clinical reasoning, and on the yet-to-be-universally-embraced crossing of professional “silos.”

About Dr. Varpio:

Dr. Lara Varpio is Associate Professor of Medicine at USU, and Adjunct Professor at the Academy for Innovation in Medical Education at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and at Carleton University’s School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (Canada). She is also a Research Fellow with the Wilson Centre for Research in Education at the University of Toronto (Canada). Dr. Varpio’s doctoral training used theories of Rhetoric and Genre Analysis to examine the practices of medical communication and to improve medical education. This award winning doctoral work investigated Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) and their impact on medical trainee socialization (2008 Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication awarded by the American National Council of Teachers of English; 2007 Alumni Gold Medal and 2007 Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies awarded by the University of Waterloo, ON).

Dr. Varpio’s program of research uses qualitative methodologies and methods to investigate Information and Communication Technologies as they are used in inter-professional healthcare teams. Her current work focuses on the clinical use (and misuse) of EPRs, in order to develop a theory of inter-professional collaboration via communication technologies. She is also currently investigating the role of narrative in medical meaning making.

Dr. Varpio relies on a range of theoretical lenses to support these investigations, including: Activity Theory, Actor Network Theory, Genre Theory, Rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. Her studies investigate the complexities inherent in the clinical use of patient information by interprofessional teams. This research focuses on how technologies impact the care practices of individual physicians and the interactions of interprofessional teams.

Dr Varpio also collaborates with clinicians in a wide variety of fields (e.g. physicians, nurses and other allied health professionals working in fields ranging from pediatrics to palliative care) and with other researchers across disciplines (e.g. from health informatics, to human factors engineering, to social work). Dr. Varpio works with medical educators from all clinical fields (e.g. surgery, anesthesia, and internal medicine) and in a wide range of topics, including: global health; e-learning; infectious disease; simulation-based training; in-training evaluation of residents; medical humanities; and curriculum needs assessment. Dr. Varpio’s research collaborations span the nation (including working with colleagues at UCSF, UMich, and the AAMC) and across international borders (notably her collaborations with Canadian and Australian colleagues).

CME Credit:
Sponsored by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine; Office for Health Sciences Education, Educator Development Core and the Academy for Excellence in Teaching

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians.Vanderbilt School of Medicine designates this live activity for a maximum of 8.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. It is the policy of the ACCME and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine to require disclosure of financial relationships from individuals in a position to control the content of a CME activity; to identify and resolve conflicts of interest related to those relationships; and to make disclosure information available to the audience prior to the CME activity. Presenters are required to disclose discussions of unlabeled/unapproved uses of drugs or devices during their presentations.