Bringing community to medical school

 In MedX Live!

It’s two in the morning and I’m unpacking boxes in the AIM Lab. I’m working with a tangle of wires, ATEM video switchers, C100 video cameras, and numerous encoding boxes in a mad-dash rush to get ready to teach ANES 205, Engage and Empower me: a course on patient engagement design. In line with AIM Lab and Medicine X philosophy, this is not technology purely for technology’s sake. The purpose is to imbue an essential ingredient into the medical school class I will be teaching at Stanford next week: community.

Engage and Empower Me, is a patient engagement design course I will be co-teaching in Winter quarter at the Stanford University School of Medicine, along with Dr. Kyra Bobinet from Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab. The goal of the course is to explore the meaning of the term “patient engagement” and to learn not only from experts in the field of behavior design but also everyday people in the real world who are using digital technologies to empower themselves to engage in their own healthcare. I don’t believe this type of learning can happen in a vacuum. The community of healthcare innovators–a sliver of which we see at Medicine X every year–is simply too large and talented not to include as part of this conversation. We want to learn from as many of you as possible.

In order to make this happen, we aim to use social media and livestreaming to bring more voices to the conversation.

A patient-centered approach: bringing patients into the classroom as teachers

Part of learning about patient engagement is to hear actual patients themselves talk about what engagement means to them. So we’re going to start each class off with an ePatient Ignite! talk on patient engagement and end each class with a discussion involving our guest lecturers that will be moderated by our ePatient. Of course, we have a stellar line-up of guest speakers who will bring exciting perspectives to the discussion.

Bringing community into the classroom

As we have learned from Medicine X, community (virtual and real-life) brings so much richness of perspective and opinion to a discussion. We hope to tap into this energy by opening our class up to the community. About half the seats in our class will be reserved for community members to attend in person. The first thirty minutes of each class (5:30PM-6:00PM) will not be livestreamed, but will instead be an opportunity for networking and informal discussion between attendees. Part of the magic of attending in person is meeting new people and engaging in personal conversations.

Join us!

If you are in the San Francico Bay Area please consider joining us Thursdays from 5:30PM – 7:00PM on the campus of Stanford University. Complementary tickets are required and we have already sold out our first class on January 9, 2014. You can find links to community tickets to our class on our AIM Lab website.

If you don’t live nearby, you can still join us through our class livestream as part of our Stanford Medicine X Live! Google+ broadcast series. You can join in the class discussion by following the #MedX hashtag on Twitter. We’ll be monitoring the discussion and taking questions as time allows.

Either in person or online, we hope to see you join the discussion around patient engagement happening in our course Engage and Empower Me Winter quarter. See you then!

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