HMSOM Medical Education Week 2024: Many Innovations, Much Discussion

Faculty, staff, students and residents from across the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine (HMSOM) and Hackensack Meridian Health took part in the proceedings of the HMSOM’s second-annual Medical Education Week.

Nearly 200 people took part in the events over the course of the week, which included workshops, discussions, poster sessions, abstract awards, and a plenary session.

The focus throughout was on innovation in medical education across the spectrum - from the medical school level to graduate medical education (residency training) to faculty development, and more. All with the goal of advancing health professions education to the ultimate end: of providing better care in the clinical setting.

An opening session and “Med Ed Journal Club” kicked off the week. It featured a discussion of a recent academic paper about how to educate for adaptive expertise, along with the analysis of a podcast episode with the authors. The session was facilitated by Vice Dean for Academic Affairs Miriam Hofman, M.D., and Jennifer Zepf, D.O., the course director of The Developing Human and an associate professor of medical sciences. The gathering was followed by a session sponsored by the Academic Medicine Student Interest Group entitled “Pulling back the curtain on the SOM curriculum.”

Four concurrent workshops were held on Tuesday afternoon: “Improvisation for Medical Education”; “Should you ditch the PowerPoint? When and how to use slides for effective learning”; “Community Engaged Graduate Medical Education: Incorporating Home Visits into Resident Curriculum”; and “Where in the world are the DoH icons? Exploring faculty ability to successfully concept map.” Each was run by faculty experts engaging the participants to come up with solutions to the respective puzzles.

Two poster sessions were held in the 4th-floor learning studio later on Tuesday - covering topics like artificial intelligence, ethics, student burnout, peer feedback, and pipelining, among many other topics.

The plenary speaker was Lyuba Konopasek, M.D., senior associate dean for Education at the Frank H. Netter M.D. School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University, whose talk was entitled “Coaching Across the Continuum: Tools for the 21st Century Educator.” An awards ceremony and reception followed to cap off Tuesday’s Medical Education Scholarship Day.

Yoga at noon kicked off Wednesday, and was followed by a workshop focused on collaborative conversations “igniting small group teaching skills.”

Human Dimension Capstone Scholarship Day included three poster sessions in which all third year students presented their required scholarly projects. Each one was based on a clinical experience during their clerkship year, and students selected a specific challenge connected to one determinant of health which they explored, analyzed, and proposed systems-level solutions for. Among the many topics: “Video Games as Treatment in Psychiatry,” “Transforming Children’s Lunches for a Healthier Future,” “Intimate Partner Violence Education in Medical School Curriculum,” “Mitigating the Adverse Effects of Loneliness on Youth Mental Health Outcomes,” “Utilization of machine learning to inform efficient discharge planning processes: a systematic review,” “Public School Health Screenings: Closing the Gap on Access to Corrective Lenses,” and others.

Also during Capstone Day: third-year student Joselin Vargas was presented with the 2024 Excellence in Public Health Award by a representative from the U.S. Public Health Service.

Library Day on Thursday featured two virtual workshops on where to publish research, and also best practices in keeping up with the scientific literature.