C. Jessica Dine, MD.
PHILADELPHIA — C. Jessica Dine, MD, an associate professor in the division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care, and director for Assessment and Evaluation in the department of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named a Macy Faculty Scholar by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. The New York-based program identifies and provides financial and other support to educational innovators in medicine and nursing.
Dine joins the eighth class of Macy Faculty Scholars. This year’s group of five scholars, who are from nursing and medical schools across the country, will pursue mentored educational innovation projects at their home institutions. Their projects deal with themes spanning inter-professional education and practice, clinical competency, simulation and telehealth technology, and the social determinants of health.
As a Macy Faculty Scholar, Dine will design and develop an assessment strategy for inter-professional collaboration in the clinical learning environment, which would appraise care providers from a number of health care professions delivering clinical care in real time. Judy A. Shea, PhD, associate dean for Medical Education Research and a professor of Medicine at Penn, will serve as Dine’s mentor for the initiative.
Dine’s strategy is based on the principle that teamwork is essential to delivering high quality patient care in today’s complex health care delivery system. Health care professionals are regularly asked to take part in inter-professional education and collaboration in order to deliver more efficient and successful patient care. Ideally, a learner’s competence in caring for patients collaboratively should be assessed by direct observation of his or her use of best practices while providing care in an authentic clinical environment, but no such tool exists. Dine aims to address this need through her Macy’s project.
Specifically, she will develop a tool to measure inter-professional collaboration skills of health care providers in the clinical learning environment. This will allow medical educators to know if their training is generating better inter-professional collaboration. Dine will assemble an interdisciplinary team of Penn-based experts to develop the assessment tool; it will comprise physicians; nurses; pharmacists; physical, respiratory, and occupational therapists; and social workers. The team will review and select items from existing inter-professional collaboration models for the new tool. These will include specific, observable skills that define competency across the learner continuum. Such examples will provide the basis to differentiate between developing, competent, and expert care providers. The team will also develop scripts for videos representing varying levels of competence that will enable estimates of inter-rater reliability of the instrument scores prior to testing in the clinical environment.
The instrument will then be used to observe learners from each of the professions in different clinical settings during clinical rotations. Data on the observed learners, the complexity of their patients’ conditions, and team members’ perception of conflict within the team will be collected to test the validity of the tool—with the hypothesis that inter-professional collaboration performance will be lower among less experienced providers, when working in more stressful environments, and amidst team conflict. Dine will also develop an electronic platform to collect data for future fine-tuning of the instrument.
Dine received her medical degree from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and completed her residency, chief residency, and pulmonary fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She received her master’s degree in health policy research from Penn during her fellowship training. Her B.S. in chemistry is from Haverford College.
The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation was founded in 1930 by Kate Macy Ladd in honor of her father, Josiah W. Macy, Jr., an American sea captain and philanthropist. It is the only national foundation dedicated to improving the training of medical professionals.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
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