HMI World

Welcome

Hospital honor roll ranks two Boston hospitals among the nation's best

Letter From The Editor

We don’t build each issue of HMI WORLD around a common theme, but sometimes those themes emerge on their own. The theme that jumps out in the November-December 2007 issue is outputs.

Around Harvard

Harvard Macy-modeled program in Singapore explores curriculum design

For the fourth consecutive year, HMI has teamed with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to deliver a five-day customized regional program for health care educators and leaders. HMI faculty Elizabeth G. Armstong, PhD, Director of Education Programs, and Tom Aretz, MD, Vice President of Global Programs, designed and delivered the program in collaboration with faculty at NUS.

“Our goal was to examine curriculum planning while investigating newly developed curricular models from around the world, and by looking at the anticipated demands on training and education posed by the health care systems of the future,” said Armstrong.

The interactive program incorporated a variety of teaching and learning formats, including case discussions, journal clubs, and consultative action and scenario planning groups. The course drew upon literature, case studies, and models of professional education from fields inside and outside of academic medicine. Each of the 30 course participants was required to pursue an institutional project as part of the course activities.

The course drew on models and activities that have become staples of the Harvard Macy Institute’s Boston-based professional development programs. As the Harvard Macy network has expanded, elements of the Institute’s courses have been adapted, customized, and delivered in multiple international locations, including Australia, Canada, india, Sweden, and the Caribbean.

Are these programs providing significant measurable and desirable results?

In an editorial published in August 2007, Dr. Armstrong demonstrated how she has attempted to answer this question with regards to the HMI-NUS programs. The editorial appeared in Annals, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Academy of Medicine in Singapore, and is available in its entirety on the Annals website.

“The key metric for evaluating programs in the past,” writes Armstrong, “has been the satisfaction of participating health care providers. Often the participants stated they enjoyed the course, time well spent from their perspective, and returned to their home institutions with little or no change visible in their behaviors.”

Using an outcomes logic approach to program evaluation, Armstrong and colleagues looked back over three years of working with NUS to develop and deliver the annual regional course, starting with the course’s initial run in 2004, the purpose, she writes, to “determine results that go beyond satisfaction, assisting us in discovering what, if any, enduring impact the collaboration has produced.”

The outcomes logic model examines the path from program creation to implementation to outcomes. Armstrong had earlier applied this approach to an evaulation of the Boston-based Harvard Macy Institute courses. What did the model reveal about the NUS courses? Said Armstrong, “We can tap data that include end-of-course satisfaction surveys that look quite positive and we can examine evidence of changed behaviors or individuals and the institutions they represented.”